Speaker Series

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Global Mental Health

This workshop will bring together psychiatrists, social scientists, and humanities scholars to discuss interdisciplinary approaches to understanding global mental health, social justice and well-being in relation to cultural, historical and political context.

DATE and TIME: March 20th, 2024 (2-5pm EST), March 21st, 2024 (8:30am -12:30pm, 2-5pm EST)

This is a HYBRID event (in-person registration is now closed)

LOCATION: Room 138, Ludmer Building

Zoom registration

2024

Date Speaker Title
January 11

Samuel O. Okpaku, MD, PhD

Reflections on Global Mental Health: Ethical and Humanitarian Considerations

2023

Date Speaker Title
December 14 Seth Abrutyn, PhD The Social Roots of High School Suicide Clusters
February 2

Sudarshan R Kottai - Assistant Professor
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
Indian Institute of Technology Palakkad

LGBTQIA+ rights movement in India: Examining the crisis of care, values and ethics in psy disciplines and state mental
health systems

January 19 Alice Bullard, PhD & Esq - Washington DC Spiritual and Mental Health Crisis in Globalizing Senegal
A History of Transcultural Psychiatry

2022

Date  Speaker Title
October 27, 2022 Ana Antic, Lamia Moghnieh, Shilpi Rajpal, Gabriel Abarca-Brown - University of Copenhagen Decolonising madness? Transcultural psychiatry, international order and the emergence of the ‘global psyche
October 6, 2022 Fahimeh Mianji, Ph.D. - Global Mental Health Researcher “Women as Troublemakers”: The Hard Sociopolitical Context of Soft Bipolar Disorder in Iran
March 10, 2022 Roy Richard Grinker, PhD - George Washington University Nobody´s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness
January 27, 2022 Sudarshan R. Kottai , PhD - CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru-29, India

Interrogating 'Care', 'Chronicity' and expansion of patienthood: Ethnographic encounters from community mental health programs in India.

2021

Date Speaker Title
March 4, 2021 Vivian Dzokoto, PhD - Virginia Commonwealth University Models of Mind and Knowing in the Akan of West Africa

2020

Date Speaker Title
December 10, 2020 Alexander Rödlach, PhD, SVD - Creighton University Improving Emotional Health in the Community: Health Ministries in Faith Communities
October 8, 2020 Seneinu Thein, PhD - UC Berkeley Becoming Naingkyin: Sacrificial Rites and Rituals of Resilience in the Burmese Democracy Movement

2019

Date Speaker Title
November 21, 2019 Marie-Hélène Doucet, PhD Student - McGill University The non-practice of female genital mutilation in Conakry: Case studies on the profiles of families in Guinea's context of high prevalence
March 12, 2019 Lynne Jones, OBE, FRCPsych, PhD - Harvard University, Boston Cross Cultural Issues and Mental Health in Conflict and Disaster Settings

2018

Date Speaker Title
December 13, 2018 Lars Hedegaard Williams, PhD(c) - Aarhus University, Denmark Trauma and prayer in post-conflict northern Uganda
December 11, 2018 Grégoire Ahongbonon, Fondateur et Directeur-général, Association Saint-Camille-de-Lellis L’Association Saint-Camille-de-Lellis : Une aide efficace et à faible coût aux personnes ayant des problèmes graves de santé mentale en Afrique de l’ouest (see location at: Douglas Hospital)
November 28, 2018 Kamaldeep Bhui, PhD - Queen Mary University, London Global Mental Health & Cultural Psychiatry: creative tensions in the discourse   (see location at: JGH)
October 18, 2018 Cristiana Giordano, PhD - University of California, Davis The Funnel Effect: The ethical unraveling of care under the power of the ban
October 15, 2018 Dörte Bemme, PhD - McGill University Contingent universals, aggregated truth: an ethnography of knowledge in Global Mental Health
August 30, 2018 Harry Wu, MD, DPhil - University of Hong Kong Profiling Mental Disorders Worldwide: a History of Science Approach

April 10, 2018

Sandra Hyde, PhD - McGill University

Moving the Air: A Contemporary Tale of Chinese Drug Rehabilitation

March 20, 2018 Ram Prasad Sapkota, PhD - McGill University Social and Psychological Correlates of Mass Psychogenic Illness in Nepal
March 15, 2018 Comparative Healthcare Systems Program

Global Mental Health Conference

February 6, 2018 Eric Jarvis, PhD - McGill University Psychiatry in colonial Africa: Perceptions of Insanity by British Practitioners

2017

Date Speaker Title
March 1, 2017 Laurence J. Kirmayer, MD - McGill University Social Origins of Mental Disorders and Primary Prevention in Global Mental Health
March 16, 2017 Frances Aboud, PhD - McGill University Evaluation of a Parenting Intervention in Uganda to Address Maternal Well-being and Child Development
April 20, 2017 Sakiko Yamaguchi, PhD Student - McGill University Underage Drinking and Changing Parent-child Relations After the Political Violence in Ayacucho Province, Peru
June 22, 2017 Kamaldeep Bhui, MD, MSc - Queen Mary University of London Pathways to Sympathy for Terrorism
September 21, 2017 Eric Latimer, PhD - McGill University

A cost-effective approach to caring for people with severe mental illness in Africa?  Staffing inpatient, outpatient and rehabilitation facilities with service users at the Saint-Camille de Léllis in French-speaking West-African countries

October 5, 2017

Matthew Heaton, PhD - Virginia Tech

Decolonization and Diagnosis in Nigeria: A Historical Appraisal of Transcultural Psychiatry in Nigeria

October 26, 2017 Vivian Afi Dzokoto, PhD -

Virginia Commonwealth University

Once upon a shrine: Traditional healing of the mind and soul in contemporary Ghana

November 15, 2017 Aliza Hunt, McGill University

Scaling up for Depression in Indonesia: The Gap Between Text and Practice

Breaking the Chains: The Case of Raja Gila (King of the Crazies) in Central Java, Indonesia

November 23, 2017 Ingrid Waldon, PhD - Dalhousie University

From the Enlightenment to Black Lives Matter: The Racial and Gendered Transformation of Schizophrenia in Psychiatry

2016

Date Speaker Title
September 21, 2016 Professor Sandra Hyde,PhD - McGill University Chasing the Dragon: The Malleable Addict and Losing Face In a Chinese Therapeutic Community
September 28, 2016 Fahimeh Mianji, PhD Student - McGill University “Women as Troublemakers”: The “Hard” Sociopolitical Context of “Soft” Bipolar Women in Iran
October 19, 2016 Marie-Helene Doucet Understanding the motivations of health-care providers in performing female genital mutilation: an integrative review of the literature
October 26, 2016 Sumin Na, MSc - McGill University Toward a Culturally Responsive Model of Mental Health Literacy: Facilitating Help-Seeking Among East Asian Immigrants to North America
October 27, 2016 Jerome Kroll, MD, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus - University of Minnesota Medical School Psychiatric Care Of Somali Refugees In Minnesota – Making Use Of History And Culture
November 16, 2016 Nicole D’Souza, PhD Student - McGill University ‘Strange Love’ in intersubjective spaces: Untangling the relational motif in participatory research with disadvantaged children in Kingston, Jamaica
November 30, 2016 Vanessa Lecompte, Postdoc - McGill University Maternal mental health, social support, sense of belonging and child attachment in South Asian immigrant families

2015

Date Speaker Title
April 2, 2015 Ram Prasad Sapkota, PhD Student Changing Landscapes: Healing Traditions and Mental Health Care in Nepal
September 4, 2015 Professor David Musimi Ndetei, University of Nairobi Providing Mental Health Services in a Low-Income Country: Challenges, Opportunities and Innovation
November 3, 2015 Astrid Kleis, Post-Doctoral Fellow Parental Ethnotheories and Socialization Goals in two Generations of Three Indigenous Contexts with Different Levels of Acculturation in Brazil - Approaches and Impressions of Cross-cultural Psychological Research in Amazonia
December 1, 2015 Professor François Bourque, McGill University From Society to Psychosis: Insights from Migrant Studies and Implications for Global Mental Health

2014

Date Speaker Title
March 13, 2014 Anna Pranjic, BSc candidate Gender Empowerment in an Indigenous Community in the Peruvian Amazon through the Implementation of a Local Cocoa Plant
April 3, 2014 Neda Faregh, PhD Setting up a virtual psychology clinic and training of mental health workers in the Republic of Chad
November 20, 2014 Nicole D'Souza, PhD Student Discussion on Lancet Commissions Publication "Culture and Health"

2013

Date Speaker Title
October 3, 2013 Duncan Pedersen, DMHUI A Step in the Right Direction: Toward a New Architecture of Global Health Research
November 7, 2013 Patricia Guimaraes, Post-Doctoral Fellow Explanatory models and the experiences of stigma among people with mental illness and their families in Minas Gerais, Brazil
December 12, 2013 Carol Zavaleta, PhD candidate Climate Change and Food Security among Amazonian Indigenous Peoples in Peru

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