Re-Visioning Psychiatry: Cultural Phenomenology, Critical Neuroscience, and Global Mental Health

Laurence J. Kirmayer · Robert Lemelson · Constance A. Cummings

Jul 2015 · Cambridge University Press

About this ebook

Re-Visioning Psychiatry explores new theories and models from cultural psychiatry and psychology, philosophy, neuroscience and anthropology that clarify how mental health problems emerge in specific contexts and points toward future integration of these perspectives. Taken together, the contributions point to the need for fundamental shifts in psychiatric theory and practice: • Restoring phenomenology to its rightful place in research and practice • Advancing the social and cultural neuroscience of brain-person-environment systems over time and across social contexts • Understanding how self-awareness, interpersonal interactions, and larger social processes give rise to vicious circles that constitute mental health problems • Locating efforts to help and heal within the local and global social, economic, and political contexts that influence how we frame problems and imagine solutions. In advancing ecosystemic models of mental disorders, contributors challenge reductionistic models and culture-bound perspectives and highlight possibilities for a more transdisciplinary, integrated approach to research, mental health policy, and clinical practice.

About the author

Laurence J. Kirmayer MD FRCPC is James McGill Professor and Director, Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry at McGill University, Montréal. He is Editor-in-Chief of Transcultural Psychiatry and Director of the Culture and Mental Health Research Unit at the Institute of Community and Family Psychiatry, Jewish General Hospital, Montréal, where he conducts research on mental health services for immigrants and refugees, indigenous peoples (First Nations, Inuit and Métis), global mental health, and the anthropology of psychiatry. He founded and directs the annual Summer Program and Advanced Study Institute in Cultural Psychiatry at McGill University. He also founded and directs the Network for Aboriginal Mental Health Research. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy for Health Sciences. He has received a CIHR senior investigator award, a presidential commendation for dedication in advancing cultural psychiatry from the Canadian Psychiatric Association, and both the Creative Scholarship and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture.

Robert Lemelson is an anthropologist who received his MA from the University of Chicago and his PhD from the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His area of specialty is Southeast-Asian studies, psychological and visual anthropology, and transcultural psychiatry. He is currently an associate adjunct professor of anthropology and a research anthropologist at the Semel Institute of Neuroscience, both at UCLA. He is also the president and founder of the Foundation for Psychocultural Research, a nonprofit research foundation supporting research and training in the neurosciences and social sciences. He has been conducting psychological and visual anthropological research in Indonesia, on the islands of Bali and Java, yearly for the past twenty years. In 2007 he founded Elemental Productions, an ethnographic documentary film production company. He has produced and directed over a dozen ethnographic films on subjects ranging from genocide, the sex trade, mental illness, kinship, ritual and further related topics.

Constance A. Cummings PhD is Project Director of the Foundation for Psychocultural Research. She is co-editor of Formative Experiences: The Interaction of Caregiving, Culture, Developmental Psychobiology (Cambridge, 2010).