Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University
Advanced Study Institute in Cultural Psychiatry
The Arts in Cultural Psychiatry:
Identity, Creativity and Transformation
June 1-3, 2015
Montreal, Québec
Advanced Study Institute Conference and Workshop (June 1-3, 2015)
Art plays a unique role in human experience both as an individual and social mode of expression and communal activity. All societies have traditions of fashioning objects, language, and performance in ways that serve to transmit culture, explore the world, entertain, and edify. Active engagement with the arts can transform suffering, give meaning to affliction and support recovery. This ASI will bring together artists, scholars, researchers, and professionals involved in mental health to discuss the role of the arts in cultural psychiatry. Art can be used to build and express individual and collective identity, as a creative process that yields new ways of experiencing the world, as a social and political intervention to critique or challenge existing frameworks, and as a modality for therapeutic interventions. Sessions will explore topics related to several broad themes: (1) the nature of creative processes of invention, enactment and improvisation; (2) the role of the arts in constructing and expressing individual and collective identities; (3) art as a medium for articulating, understanding and coping with the experience of mental health and illness; (4) public, social or political uses of art to raise awareness and challenge marginality and oppression; (5) art making as a creative medium for therapeutic exploration, growth, and transformation; and (6) the uses of art in conflict resolution and mental health promotion.
The format will be a public Conference and artistic event (June 1) directed to mental health practitioners, educators and policy makers, followed by a two-day Workshop (June 2 & 3) for researchers working on these issues.
Guest Faculty
Gilles Bibeau, Frederick W. Hickling, Hilary Robertson-Hickling, Francis Lu, Stephen Snow, Geoffrey Walcott, Gilah Yelin Hirsch
McGill Faculty
Ellen Corin, Danielle Groleau, Jaswant Guzder, Laurence J. Kirmayer, Eric Lewis, Duncan Pedersen, Cécile Rousseau, Rob Whitley
Register for the ASI by downloading the 2015_registration_form.pdf
There will be a poster session on June 1, 2015. To submit a poster, please complete the 2015_poster_presentation_form.pdf form and send it with your application for the ASI Conference.
If paying by credit card, please use the 2015_credit_card_authorization_form.pdf
For payment via wire transfers, please click on the following link.
Selected papers from the ASI will appear in a thematic issue of Transcultural Psychiatry: http://tps.sagepub.com
Please note that the deadline for the Summer School Program does not apply to the Advanced Study Institute.