What is culturally informed psychiatry?
Journal article, Peer reviewed
This is an open-access article published by the royal college of psychiatrists and distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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2015Metadata
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Original version
Leseth, A. B. (2015). What is culturally informed psychiatry? Cultural understanding and withdrawal in the clinical encounter. BJPsych Bull, 39(4), 187-190.Abstract
What is culturally informed psychiatry? What does it mean, and why is itimportant? These questions are discussed with a focus on the cultural aspects of theclinical encounter. The DSM-5Outline for Cultural Formulationwas developed as amethod of assessing the cultural factors affecting the clinical encounter. It calls for theassessment of the cultural features of the relationship between the patient and theclinician; however, there is a lack of debate about what this means in practice.Clinicians run the risk of withdrawal rather than cultural understanding when facingpatients with different cultural backgrounds. Using ethnographic material fromanthropological fieldwork, I suggest that the encounter with cultural differences couldbe a useful point of departure for the clinician to develop cultural understanding. It isargued that recognising the experiences of differences is crucial in strengtheningtranscultural communication and preventing misdiagnosis in the clinician-patientencounter.