The training program is individually tailored and provides:
- postdoctoral fellowships for researchers with a background in psychiatry, psychology, family medicine, social work, nursing, public health, bioethics or social sciences applied to medicine (e.g. medical anthropology)
- support for students in doctoral programs at McGill in one of the participating departments who wish to focus on culture and mental health services research (psychology, sociology, social work, anthropology, etc.)
- an MSc in Psychiatry for students with appropriate clinical or research background who wish to acquire additional research expertise
- the annual McGill Summer Program in Social and Cultural Psychiatry and the McGill Summer School in Epidemiology and Biostatistics provide a way for visiting students to take course work during the summer months allowing them to integrate this specialized training with programs at other universities or ongoing research activities at other institutions across Canada and abroad
- annual Advanced Institutes designed to address current research topics and themes by bringing together scholars from around the world for an intensive seminar and conference
The training emphasis is on conducting research in collaboration with program faculty and their collaborators across Canada and internationally. Trainees will be assigned to mentors with whom they will develop research projects under supervision as appropriate to their level of experience. Mentors for this program include some of the leading researchers in Canada in the areas of culture and mental health research, psychological anthropology, and medical anthropology. Active participation of faculty from a wide range of disciplines-including bioethics, epidemiology, family medicine, health economics, law, psychology, public health, social work, and sociology-fosters interdisciplinary thinking about research questions and methodologies.
Research activities are based at three units: (i) the Culture and Mental Health Research Unit of the Jewish General Hospital; (ii) the Immigrant and Refugee Children's Mental Health Research Unit based at the Montreal Children's Hospital; and (iii) the Psychosocial Research Division of the Douglas Hospital (a WHO Collaborating Centre). Each research team has weekly meetings.
In addition, the McGill Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry has two monthly seminar series: (i) Culture and Clinic based at the Montreal Children's Hospital, focuses on clinical case studies), and (ii) Culture and Community Mental Health based at the Jewish General Hospital, focuses on social and community psychiatric research. Researchers will be exposed to the clinical practice and policy milieus through processes of consultation over research projects, participatory research, the selection and use of ethical research methods, and extensive dissemination activities.