Cultural Influences in Psychiatry

To the Editor In a Viewpoint, Dr Guinart et al highlighted the need for fuller consideration of transcultural psychiatry to better explain cultural variation in clinical trials of psychotropic medicines. As the article suggested, such research is bedeviled by questions of interrater reliability, variations in the expression of stigmatizing emotional experience, and capacity for measuring treatment response. Neglecting cultural contexts distorts the results of clinical trials. Such concerns about cultural validity for effective clinical practice, in fact, motivated formulation of the “new cross-cultural psychiatry” as an upgrade for transcultural psychiatry more than 4 decades ago.
Source: JAMA - Category: General Medicine Source Type: research