What is cultural psychiatry?
Cultural psychiatry is the study and treatment of mental illnesses in individuals, which also takes into account the wider consequences of race, ethnicity, religion and cultural background. This approach to contextual psychiatry has grown significantly because modern societies have become more diverse. Cultural psychiatry is an extensive discipline that uses research on social and behavioral scientists, medical and cultural anthropologists and worldwide mental health workers in determining the best course of clinical treatment of individual patients. For example, in the treatment of an individual for depression, cultural psychiatrist could consider factors such as psychological consequences of discrimination of migration and acultural stress, aspects of native spirituality and religion, or belief in traditional or folk medicines. In the core, cultural psychiatry seeks to increase the effectiveness of clinical services - diagnostics, care and treatment - for people from different environments.
people who practice cultural psychiatry focus on the importance of cultural influences in mental health in an effort to provide culturally relevant care. The concept of culture is not so much associated with the discipline of psychiatry as integrated in it. For example, there are often big differences in how people who come from different cultures and who feel mentally well express their anxiety, both in language and conceptually. Therefore, for a cultural psychiatrist, to better understand the patient's mental condition, it is therefore often necessary for the doctor to collect information about the patient's family background and his social/cultural context. Together with race, ethnicity and religion, relevant information can include personal and family ambitions, perceived identification features of socio -economic class and its and immigration or emigration experiences and history.
The effects of acculturation stress are a focus of cultural psychiatry, but they are generally not solved in traditional psychiatry. The acculturation occurs whenOne culture or individual within this culture is modified or changed as a result of contact or absorption by another culture. Increasing the migration of people and groups around the world is one of the reasons for the growth of intercultural approaches to mental illnesses. Cultural psychiatry not only takes into account the limitation of traditional categories of mental illnesses, but also includes the categories of cultural and indigenous mental illnesses. The intercultural psychiatrist distinguishes between the disease, a disorder of biological or psychological processes, and diseases, which is a personal and cultural reaction to the disease.
in cultural psychiatry, culture-defined as faith, values and practices of a particular ethno-cultural group-is not considered static. The culture, as applies to individuals, is an ever -evolving dynamic concept that is influenced not only by aculturation, but among other things the problems of poverty, social class and gender. Moreover, just because the individual is a member of a distinct culture does not necessarily mean that he is holding everythingCH's faith, customs or rituals of the group in general. In cultural psychiatry, the patient is considered an individual and as a social being in a cultural context.