Children Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Title: Where Is the Family in Global Mental Health? Presenter: Vincenzo Di Nicola, M.D., Ph.D. Learning Objectives: Audience participants will be able to: (1) Articulate why a central role for families is needed for the effectiveness... more

Title: Where Is the Family in Global Mental Health?
Presenter: Vincenzo Di Nicola, M.D., Ph.D.

Learning Objectives:
Audience participants will be able to:
(1) Articulate why a central role for families is needed for the effectiveness of clinical and research programs in Global Mental Health (GMH);
(2) Describe how health categories that focus solely on individuals can obscure awareness of relational, social, and cultural processes that contribute to health and illness.

Abstract:

From a family perspective, the Global Mental Health Movement appears as a regressive step to the usual Western health categories that focus on individuals as bearers of larger issues in the family, community, society and culture. These larger envelopes are addressed in the impersonal way of categories—e.g., child abuse, substance abuse, violence, and treatment gaps—rather than from the relational, social and cultural perspectives that define mental health and illness more fully, meaningfully, and realistically. These aspects of GMH may deepen the practitioners’ perception of public health and epidemiology and their international organizations as being removed from clinical concerns and from their meaningful relational contexts. Without such notions as attachment and belonging, ignoring the most significant of human relationships based on the family and community, GMH risks creating another disembodied field divorced from our lived experience as communal and relational beings.

References

Di Nicola, Vincenzo. A Stranger in the Family: Culture, Families, and Therapy. New York & London: W.W. Norton, 1997.

Di Nicola, Vincenzo. Letters to a Young Therapist: Relational Practices for the Coming Community. New York & Dresden: Atropos Press, 2011.

Di Nicola, Vincenzo. Family, psychosocial, and cultural determinants of health. In: Sorel, Eliot, ed., 21st Century Global Mental Health. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2012, pp. 119-150.

Bio Sketch

Vincenzo Di Nicola, MPhil, MD, PhD, is a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist who uses family, social and cultural perspectives to investigate children and families in disadvantaged contexts, both at home and abroad. He works with migrant children and families and the impacts of trauma. Di Nicola is the author of “A Stranger in the Family: Culture, Families, and Therapy” (1997), “Letters to a Young Therapist” (2011), and a forthcoming selection of his writing, “On the Threshold: Children, Families, and Culture Change,” edited and introduced by Armando Favazza, MD, MPH. Di Nicola is Chair of the APA Global Mental Health Caucus and Full Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Montreal.