Upcoming events
31st Annual Summer Program in Social and Cultural Psychiatry
May 5 - June 27, 2025
Montreal, QC 2025
Culture, Mind and Brain Workshop
June 18-20, 2025
9:00am - 5:00pm
Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University
Summer Program in Social and Cultural Psychiatry Culture, Mind and Brain
Co-sponsored by the Foundation for Psychocultural Research (www.thefpr.org) and the McGill Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives program (www.mcgill.ca/hbhl). This workshop will provide an overview of core topics and recent developments in social, and cultural neuroscience research in order to promote cross-disciplinary collaboration in mental health.
Advanced Study Institute
Cultural Configurations of the Self
June 25 - 27, 2025
Montreal, QC 2025
Past events
Culture, Mind and Brain Workshop
June 19-21, 2023
Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University
Summer Program in Social and Cultural Psychiatry Culture, Mind and Brain
Co-sponsored by the Foundation for Psychocultural Research (www.thefpr.org) and the McGill Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives program (www.mcgill.ca/hbhl). This workshop will provide an overview of core topics and recent developments in social, and cultural neuroscience research in order to promote cross-disciplinary collaboration in mental health.
Topics will include:
- The co-evolution of culture, mind and brain;
- Ecosocial views of the brain;
- Cultural affordances and thinking through other minds;
- Integrating evolutionary, computational and cultural psychiatry;
- Neuroscience of agency and subjectivity;
- Developmental neuroscience and brain health;
- Social determinants of health in neuroscience research;
- Screen time, rewards and the brain;
- Affective neuroscience of prejudice and discrimination;
- Cities and psychosis;
- Medication and imagination;
- Psychedelics Suggestible physiology and placebo science;
- The place of neuroscience in person-centered psychiatry, and;
- The future of the brain.
Texts
Choudhury, S., & Slaby, J. (Eds.). (2016). Critical neuroscience: A handbook of the social and cultural contexts of neuroscience. John Wiley & Sons
Kirmayer, L.J., Worthman, C., Kitayama, S., Lemelson, R. & Cummings, C. (Eds.) (2020). Culture, Mind and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Methods & Applications. Cambridge.
Guest Faculty
Axel Constant, University of Sydney
Guillaume Dumas, University of Montreal
Lasana Harris, University College London
McGill Faculty
Véronique Bohbot, Department of Psychiatry
Ian Gold, Departments of Philosophy & Psychiatry
Ana Gómez-Carrillo, Culture, Mind and Brain Program
Alberto Inserra, Department of Psychiatry
Laurence J. Kirmayer, Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry
Michael Lifshitz, Culture, Mind and Brain Program
Jay Olson, Department of Psychology
Elizaveta Solomonova, Culture, Mind and Brain Program
Samuel Veissière, Culture, Mind and Brain Program
Ashey Wazana, Department of Psychiatry
Book launch: Culture, Mind, and Brain
September 2020
We are very pleased to announce the launch of our new book Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Models, and Applications. The book is available on Amazon or through the 
Culture Mind and Brain flyer
Edited by
- Laurence J. Kirmayer
McGill University, Montréal - Carol M. Worthman
Emory University, Atlanta - Shinobu Kitayama
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor - Robert Lemelson
University of California, Los Angeles - Constance Cummings
The Foundation for Psychocultural Research
Summary
Recent neuroscience research makes it clear that human biology is cultural biology - we develop and live our lives in socially constructed worlds that vary widely in their structure, values, and institutions. This integrative volume brings together interdisciplinary perspectives from the human, social, and biological sciences to explore culture, mind, and brain interactions and their impact on personal and societal issues. Contributors provide a fresh look at emerging concepts, models, and applications of the co-constitution of culture, mind, and brain. Chapters survey the latest theoretical and methodological insights alongside the challenges in this area, and describe how these new ideas are being applied in the sciences, humanities, arts, mental health, and everyday life. Readers will gain new appreciation of the ways in which our unique biology and cultural diversity shape behavior and experience in our ongoing adaptation to a constantly changing world.
Rethinking Psychosis: Culture, Brain, and Context
January 10-11, 2014
View Rethinking Psychosis website
2013 International Cultural Neuroscience Consortium Conference
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
CBDMH Seminar at UCLA by Ian Gold (McGill University)
March 13, 2013
Psychiatry and Culture: The Case of Delusion
Delusions, as Jaspers remarked, have always been the archetypal symptom of madness. It is surprising, therefore, that contemporary psychiatry has rather little to say about delusions or about the ways in which delusions change with time and culture. In this talk, I make some suggestions about why this is the case. Further, I discuss the changes to psychiatric thinking that are required to better understand delusions and, thereby, psychosis.
New grant for project on Treatment for Psychological Trauma
Duncan Pederson and Alain Brunet together with Hanna Kienzler and Bhogendra Sharma were successful in receiving a Grand Challenges Canada grant to begin work in Nepal. The grant will enable them to pilot a reconsolidation blockade intervention with survivors of torture at the C-VICT centre in Kathmandu. The group will also carry out qualitative interviews with counsellors and survivors documenting narratives of distress.
New Member
Dr. Brandon Kohrt, a psychiatrist anthropologist who has done extensive ethnographic and cultural psychiatric research in Nepal has joined the project to collaborate on work in Nepal.
New Students
- Claire Champigny
- Eli Scheiner
Study of cultural difference in hypnotizability/suggestibility
Amir Raz's student, Eli Sheiner has been doing preliminary research in Japan, interviewing academic researchers about the interaction between culture and hypnotic suggestion. Claire Champigny, also a student of Raz, is studying cross-cultural differences in hynotizability, with a view to developing a pilot study to be conducted with student populations in Singapore.
Folk Psychiatry and Mental Health Literacy
Lauren Ban, former postdoctoral fellow now based at the University of Melbourne, is developing a project to investigate cross-cultural differences in "folk theories" through which ideas of disorder/pathology are filtered. This will be used for a questionnaire and interview study to be done with psychology students in Singapore.
Placebo Workshop
Placebos in the Clinic? Fostering Ethical, Educational, Policy and Practical Consensus
The meeting, Placebos in the Clinic? Fostering Ethical, Educational, Policy and Practical Consensus, will bring together prominent placebo researchers from diverse fields as well as physicians, policy makers and related experts to discuss the realities of using placebos, placebo effects and placebo-like treatments in clinical practice.
Date: May 23-24, 2012 | 8:30am - 5:30pm | McGill University, Downtown Campus
Mind, Brain & Culture Methods Workshop
This workshop presents the latest advances in a range of experimental methodologies from brain imaging with MEG to epigenetics with the goal to develop cross-disciplinary investigations of interactions between cultural and neurobiological processes.
Date: May 28, 2012 | Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University
Critical Neuroscience Workshop
This course provides an overview of recent controversies surrounding cognitive neuroscience and the implications of the emerging fields of social and cultural neuroscience for psychiatry, industry, policy and other areas of social life. It will present key studies in social and cultural neuroscience from the last two decades and examine the potentials and limitations of predominant methodologies, particularly neuroimaging. The course will present the interdisciplinary project of critical neuroscience as a framework and set of tools with which to critically analyze interpretations of neuroscience data in the academic literature, their representation in popular domains and more broadly, the growth of neurocultures since the Decade of the Brain. The course will problematize and consider alternatives to neurobiological reductionism in psychiatry, neuroethics, cultural neuroscience and neuropolicy, attending to the models, metaphors and political contexts of mainstream brain research. It will also explore various avenues for engagement between neuroscience, social science and humanities.
This is an interdisciplinary graduate level course and part of the Summer School in Transcultural Psychiatry. In-depth knowledge of neuroscience is not required but some understanding of neuroimaging research in cognitive neuroscience is useful. The course is relevant to neuroscientists interested in the social and political implications of their research, as well as psychiatrists, mental health workers and medical anthropologists interested in the meaning, limits and possibilities of emerging forms of "evidence" in biomedical cultures.
Date: May 29 - June 1, 2012
Faculty: Suparna Choudhury, Ian Gold, Eric Jarvis, Laurence Kirmayer, Daniel Margulies, Amir Raz, Jan Slaby, Allan Young