Cultural Psychiatry

The very immediacy of the recent terrorist attacks makes the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder problematic since there is no distance of time or space from the event itself. How can clinicians deal with this shift to best treat patients?

In the glossary of our book The Culture-Bound Syndromes, Charles C. Hughes, Ph.D., listed almost 200 folk illnesses that have, at one time or another, been considered culture-bound syndromes (Simons and Hughes, 1986). Many have wonderfully exotic and evocative names: Arctic hysteria, amok, brain fag, windigo.

The issue for us is whether positive thinking is relevant in certain situations. Would it help, or would it create more problems than it would solve?

With so many Americans lacking appropriate health care insurance and so much of the large insurance companies' premiums going to overhead and profit, it makes sense to move forward with a single payer system. The author discusses some of the basic features of a proposed system.

Stemming from evolutionary man and his simple, primitive act of help in exchange for help and Darwinian theory, Paul Genova, M.D., discusses the role reciprocal altruism plays in the "helping profession" of psychiatry.

This is the second part of an article series discussing the high risk of suicide attempts in patients with schizophrenia. Herbert Y. Meltzer, M.D., continues the discussion with treatment options and efficacy.

People are different, according to conventional wisdom - the saying generally used in explaining varying opinions, attitudes or ways of thinking. Why then is it not a given that people are different in basic brain functions such as learning and intelligence?

Men's Reactions to Female Sexual Coercion

Two studies of patients who switched from Clozaril to generic clozapine are being evaluated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to determine whether the rating of the generic drug as bioequivalent (AB) to the brand-reference drug should be reconsidered and whether additional bioavailability assessment should be undertaken.

Although comprehensive theories of addiction recognize the etiological importance of environmental and cognitive factors, it has been widely accepted for many years that addiction is also a brain disease and that individuals differ in their susceptibility to this condition.

After this Tibetan monk's release, he fled across the Nepali border, made his way to India and then to New York City, where he was referred to a program for survivors of torture.

A man named Edward Charles Allaway walked into a college library at California State University in Fullerton, Calif., and, using a .22-caliber rifle, killed seven people and wounded two others in 10 minutes. One of the few individuals who was successfully defended with a plea of insanity, Allaway was ultimately committed to a state psychiatric institution. This incident is not ripped from today's headlines, but from newspapers with a 1976 dateline.

Present-day psychiatry has fallen into crisis because of the severe limitations of its conception of the person and, as a result, its conception of the patient. It objectifies the patient in a number of ways. Because of this reductionism, psychiatry fails to distinguish between healthy and pathological features of human life. It fails to consider adequately the psychological and social factors that cause and maintain each patient's problems.

Let us begin with an example. Suppose I am traveling from the United States to Switzerland, anticipating skiing with my son in the Alps. My anticipation becomes vivid and lively. I recall excitement mixed with joy at rapidly soaring down the mountainside, and I am now quite anxious to re-experience this thrilling adventure with my son-eager to be heading down the mountain with him. Later, as we stand on the crest of a deep and winding slope, the speed, thrill and admixture of danger and adventure will infuse my being.

Alternative medicine was the theme of this issue of JAMA and in each of the other nine American Medical Association journals published in November. The editors of these scientific journals made an effort to provide physicians and other health care professionals with clinically relevant, reliable, fresh scientific information on alternative therapies.

Culture has been identified as one of the etiological factors leading to the development of eating disorders. Rates of these disorders appear to vary among different cultures and to change across time as cultures evolve. Additionally, eating disorders appear to be more widespread among contemporary cultural groups than was previously believed.

In Western psychiatry, depression is considered a major cause of suicide. But research from China calls that assumption into question. More than 300,000 suicides occur annually in China, nearly 10 times the number of suicides in the United States.

Meeting the mental health needs of the millions of immigrants from diverse cultural backgrounds and homelands who now live in the United States may require more than a thorough knowledge of psychiatry or psychology, according to a number of cultural psychiatric practitioners.

Meeting the mental health needs of the millions of immigrants from diverse cultural backgrounds and homelands who now live in the United States may require more than a thorough knowledge of psychiatry or psychology, according to a number of cultural psychiatric practitioners.

The poet must remember that it is his poetry which bears the guilt for the vulgar prose of life, whereas the man of everyday life ought to know that the fruitlessness of art is due to his willingness to be unexacting and to the unseriousness of the concerns to his life. The individual must be answerable through and through: all of his constituent moments must not only fit next to each other in the temporal sequence of his life, but must also interpenetrate each other in the unity of guilt and answerability-M.M. Bakhtin, 1919

As health care continues to shift in the United States from fee-for-service to managed care, and away from specialist-driven care to the primary care gatekeeper, it is necessary to re-examine psychiatric training and the psychiatric services that are being provided.

A new booklet released in April of this year provides, for the first time in modern medical history, a road map for ending life with physician assistance. Entitled The Oregon Death With Dignity Act: A Guidebook for Health Care Providers, the publication was the product of a two-year project sponsored by the Center for Ethics in Health Care at the Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland.

In more than two dozen programs throughout the United States, telepsychiatry is ushering in a new way of bringing mental health services to thousands of individuals who, in the past, may have gone without. More often than not, however, they are pilot projects or grant-supported endeavors, meaning that these prototypes of the psychiatrist's office of the future have yet to prove themselves in the medical marketplace.

The dramatic series of recent school shootings in nearly every region of the country has forever altered the way American society views its children. Fueled by media accounts that convey the drama of kids out of control, politicians, public policymakers, school administrators and parents now struggle for answers.

Among the specialized refugee population in the United States, there is little research on the gender differences in psychological distress, which is considerable. Southeast Asian refugee women have been identified as an at-risk group for developing serious psychiatric disorders primarily due to their premigration experiences.