Sociocultural Issues in Psychiatry

This book explains fundamental concepts in cultural psychiatry using a case-based format and is geared toward clinicians and educators in the mental health fields. Whereas similar books have focused on providing guidelines for working clinically with specific populations, such as racial/ethnic or sexual/gender minorities, this book aims to expand the concept of culture as both multifactorial and dynamic, and to enhance knowledge and skills for translating theory into practice across diverse patient populations and clinical contexts. Chapters cover culture as a multidimensional construct; the way cultural issues have been treated in successive editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; global psychiatric epidemiology; social determinants of psychiatric illness; the checkered past of psychiatry as a profession; minority stress theory; explanatory models of mental illness; the roles that religion, spirituality, gender, and sexuality play in the psychiatric encounter; implicit bias; how to respond to patients who request a provider of a specific race or gender; handling cultural challenges; and teaching sociocultural psychiatry across the lifespan. The goal of the book is to educate mental health clinicians at all levels, whether trainees, junior faculty, or senior faculty engaged in lifelong learning.