The number of Iranian immigrants in Canada has been increasing since 1979. This study is the result of a review of 111 charts of Iranian patients who were referred for psychiatric treatment between...

Psychiatric problems among Iranian immigrants in Canada.

Arab-American patients: a medical record review.

The culture-reactive syndromes, or culture-bound disorders, have long been discussed in the transcultural psychiatric literature (see Aberle 1952; Rubel 1964; Van Brero 1895; etc.). Early discussions by physicians, missionaries and visitors to diverse regions of the world who brought forth descriptions and analyses of psychiatric syndromes, different from those known to Europeans and Americans, stimualted both medical and anthropological interest. Such accounts continue to fill the pages of numerous journals, as one syndrome after another is subject to scrutiny. Recent examples include Lebra (1976), Yap (1969), Carr (1978), Simons (1980) and Manschreck and Petri (1978).

Saladerra - a culture-bound misfortune syndrome in the Peruvian Amazon.

Many people of different ethnic groups enter therapy today, and therapists must choose among different ways to approach their problems. This article provides a brief, strategic family therapy approach that can be an alternative to a culture-focused therapy. The culture-oriented therapist focuses on understanding cultural premises and attempting to do therapy within the world view of clients. The strategic approach emphasizes the structure of the family and offers techniques that can be used whatever the culture. Ways of dealing with ethnicity are presented here, with a focus on problems of violence and alternate belief systems. The strategies emphasized are (a) minimizing ethnic issues as much as possible and dealing with the case in terms of the social context and family structure, (b) focusing on ethnicity as the basic therapy approach, and (c) combining the two approaches (structural and ethnic).

Ethnicity in family therapy: A comparison of brief strategic therapy and culture-focused therapy

The onset of large-scale worker immigration to West-Germany in the 1950s opened a new chapter in the history of medical care, a chapter that today, more than thirty years later, has not yet come to a close. Because the migrant workers came from other cultures and accordingly brought with them different concepts and customs concerning therapeutic measures, this wave of immigrants — like the later medical challenges in the countries encompassed under the term “third world” — had an impact upon both the forms of comunication and the forms of knowledge in the medical world.

The Development and Change of Health Research among Migrant Workers in West-Germany

Interpretations of studies which show a correlation between migration and mental illness generally focus on sociocultural variables while giving scant attention to determinants of cognitive-personality orientations. This article examines childhood socialization practices as a key variable for comparing points of psychological stress between the traditional rural culture and the post-industrial urban culture. The hypothesis that harsh and restrictive childhood socialization practices foster the development of a cognitivepersonality orientation which increases the likelihood of maladaptive responses to culture change is illustrated by anthropological and psychological data obtained from Sicilians living in Sicily, the U.S.A. and Australia. Suggestions are given for minimizing the mental health risks involved during the critical transition period following migration.

Josephine Jo Danna

Papers

Migration and mental illness: What role do traditional childhood socialization practices play?