Cultural Psychiatry

Psychiatrists need to understand how living in violent families and neighborhoods increases the likelihood of trauma and the psychiatric sequelae associated with it as well as how to respond in the aftermath.

When attempting to incorporate resilience-building strategies into practice, it is worthwhile to note that resilience is a dynamic concept in which successful coping may mean a mixture of major real-life successes in the context of continuing difficulties.

The intense level of international interest in DSM-5 is a great surprise. Although DSM has become a research standard around the world, it is rarely used by clinicians outside the US and therefore poses a much lesser threat to their patients. So why all the prominent media coverage in countries outside of the US?

The ethical aim of psychiatry is the relief of suffering and incapacity.

All psychiatry, anywhere in the world, is American psychiatry. This is both good and bad.

Both clinicians and weather forecasters employ the same general process of information gathering, analysis, and reaching a conclusion.

Psychiatry residents can carve out a career in the area of psychiatry that interests them. If drawn to specialized topics, such as atypical bipolar disorder, club drugs, glutamate transporters, or genetic links to autism, then they should pursue those avenues.

In our time, it seems that the number of psychiatrists who believe in a God are increasing, parallel with the decreasing influence of Freud’s ideas.

Changes will mean patients will only be covered for psychiatrists’ services that include medical evaluation and management; CPT coding will not allow for coverage of psychotherapy as a separate and equal category for payment.

Historically, there has been conflict between psychiatry and religion.

Bringing the arts and humanities to psychiatry requires bringing these areas of study into our education, our research and our practice models.

Freud famously quipped: "The creative writer cannot evade the psychiatrist nor the psychiatrist the creative writer."

Research efforts for LGBT patients include creating innovative medical and mental health services that lead to the training of students and practitioners and promote the development of outreach strategies specific to today’s critical needs.

The news media has always been in the business of searching for "the right sort of madness" to capture the public's imagination.

Crucial changes occurred that will greatly influence the organization of services, reimbursement, and diagnosis. It even ended in an exclamation point, as the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut punctuated the need for improved mental healthcare services.

Now that President Obama has been re-elected, the Monday morning quarterbacking has begun. What went right in each campaign? What went wrong? Who is next to run in 2016?

The article focuses on eating disorders in males and presents information on similarities and differences between males and females as they relate to risk factors, clinical presentation, and treatment.

R.I.P. Rest Inspiring Psychiatrists. I am grateful for having known you.

Suicide involves a complex array of psychological, biological, social, and cultural factors, and it is particularly likely to occur during periods of individual, family, and socioeconomic crises associated with loss and shame. What 3 psychiatric disorders are most often associated with suicide?

Ringing the Bell to Save the Bereavement Exclusion.

Using a question-and-answer format, we present a brief overview of issues that arise when mental health professionals explore how to best serve this population.

Psychiatry has much in common with dentistry. After all, long ago psychiatry threw its lot in with the rest of medicine-that is, general medicine, specialty medicine, and surgery.

Ongoing advances in functional brain imaging will permit studies on postulated roles of magnetic fields, biophotons, and macroscopic highly coherent quantum field effects on normal brain functioning and mental illness.

Psychotherapy is a rubric--an umbrella under which a vast array of differing interventions exist. Its diverse forms are supported by different ideologies and vocabularies.

We do not need psychiatrists who fit people into categories and slots and treat them as if they are robots, according to the dictates of a recipe book called “The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.”

Ethics in the field of mental health is a concern for every psychiatrist, but what happens when past patients reenter a retired clinician's life in a personal setting?

Retirement requires psychological preparation. The planning and anticipation in itself can sometimes bring even more happiness.

In light of our problems and uncertainties about the state of current psychiatry, or perhaps because of them, what might describe good psychiatry? Following are some suggestions for what we, as psychiatrists, can do.

The mental health toll of any form of discrimination is great.

In our current age of increasingly biological psychiatry, psychiatrists seem to be paying less and less attention to the humanities, even as internists and surgeons are paying more attention.