Dr. Laurence J. Kirmayer, MD, FRCPC
James McGill Professor and Director, Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University.
Dr. Kirmayer is Editor-in-Chief of Transcultural Psychiatry, a quarterly scientific journal published by Sage (UK) and directs the Culture & Mental Health Research Unit at the Department of Psychiatry, Sir Mortimer B. Davis—Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. From 1987-1993 he was a psychiatric consultant for the Inuit communities of Nunavik on the Hudson coast. He founded and co-directs the National Network for Aboriginal Mental Health Research and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Institute for Aboriginal Peoples Health. Currently, he is the principal investigator on a cross-national study of resilience among Indigenous peoples in Canada and New Zealand. His past research includes funded studies on the development and evaluation of a cultural consultation service in mental health, cultural concepts of mental health and illness in Inuit communities, risk and protective factors for suicide among Inuit youth in Nunavik (Northern Québec). He has two co-edited books in preparation, Healing Traditions: The Mental Health of Canadian Aboriginal Peoples (University of British Columbia Press) and Understanding Trauma: Integrating Biological, Clinical and Cultural Perspectives (Cambridge University Press) as well as a book on the anthropology of psychiatry, Healing and the Invention of Metaphor.