Frontiers in Psychology
2024
Anya Daly, Rosa Ritunnano, Shaun Gallagher et al.
17 citations
Mental disorders are increasingly understood as involving complex alterations of self that emerge from dynamical interactions of constituent elements, including cognitive, bodily, affective, social, narrative, cultural and normative aspects and processes. An account of self that supports this view is the pattern theory of self (PTS). The PTS is a non-reductive account of the self, consistent...
Transcultural Psychiatry
October 1, 2023
Laurence J. Kirmayer
This issue of Transcultural Psychiatry presents selected papers from the McGill Advanced Study Institute on “Cultural Poetics of Illness and Healing.” The meeting addressed the cognitive science of language, metaphor, and poiesis from embodied and enactivist perspectives; how cultural affordances, background knowledge, discourse, and practices enable and constrain poiesis; the cognitive and...
Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry
June 1, 2023
Boon-Ooi Lee, Laurence J. Kirmayer
7 citations
While some early studies suggested that spirit mediums were psychiatrically ill individuals who found a culturally sanctioned role, subsequent work has found that they are generally in good physical and mental health. While the calling to be a healer often involves an initiatory illness, practitioners go on to play demanding social roles, suggesting that involvement in mediumship may be...
Transcultural Psychiatry
October 1, 2022
Gabriella Gobbi, Antonio Inserra, Kyle T. Greenway et al.
9 citations
Psychedelics have been already used by human societies for more than 3000 years, mostly in religious and healing context. The renewed interest in the potential application of psychedelic compounds as novel therapeutics has led to promising preliminary evidence of clinical benefit in some psychiatric disorders. Despite these promising results, the potential for large-scale clinical application...
Transcultural Psychiatry
December 1, 2020
Boon-Ooi Lee, Laurence J. Kirmayer
41 citations
This article explores the processes of transformation of the self in dang-ki healing, a form of Chinese spirit mediumship in Singapore, drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic research. In dang-ki healing, it is believed that a deity possesses a human, who is called a dang-ki, to help clients (i.e., devotees). Through the dang-ki, clients can interact with powerful deities in ways that...
Frontiers in Psychology
July 29, 2020
Jared R. Lindahl, D. James Cooper, Nathan E. Fisher et al.
2 citations
Studies in the psychology and phenomenology of religious experience have long acknowledged similarities with various forms of psychopathology. Consequently, it has been important for religious practitioners and mental health professionals to establish criteria by which religious, spiritual, or mystical experiences can be differentiated from psychopathological experiences. Many previous attempts...
Frontiers in Psychiatry
2020
Ram P Sapkota, Alain Brunet, Laurence J. Kirmayer
21 citations
This paper presents the first systematic case-control study of correlates of mass psychogenic illness (MPI) in an adolescent school population. MPI is generally construed as a dissociative phenomenon spread by social contagion to individuals who are prone to dissociation. We sought to test if the correlates of dissociative experiences most commonly proposed in the literature could predict...
Medical Humanities
June 1, 2019
Laurence J. Kirmayer, Ana Gómez-carrillo
104 citations
In this paper, we examine some of the conceptual, pragmatic and moral dilemmas intrinsic to psychosomatic explanation in medicine, psychiatry and psychology. Psychosomatic explanation invokes a social grey zone in which ambiguities and conflicts about agency, causality and moral responsibility abound. This conflict reflects the deep-seated dualism in Western ontology and concepts of personhood...
The Behavioral and brain sciences
May 30, 2019
Samuel P. L. Veissière, Axel Constant, Maxwell J D Ramstead et al.
362 citations
The processes underwriting the acquisition of culture remain unclear. How are shared habits, norms, and expectations learned and maintained with precision and reliability across large-scale sociocultural ensembles? Is there a unifying account of the mechanisms involved in the acquisition of culture? Notions such as "shared expectations," the "selective patterning of attention and behaviour,"...
Oxford University Press eBooks
April 5, 2018
Michael Lifshitz, Eli Oda Sheiner, Laurence J. Kirmayer
22 citations
This chapter explores psychedelics as catalysts of spontaneous thought. Classic serotonergic psychedelics such as psilocybin, LSD, and ayahuasca can induce potent alterations in cognition and perception. The chapter reviews research on these substances through the lens of cultural neurophenomenology, which aims to trace how neurobiology and sociocultural factors interact to shape experience....
Transcultural Psychiatry
August 1, 2015
Laurence J. Kirmayer
188 citations
Mindfulness meditation and other techniques drawn from Buddhism have increasingly been integrated into forms of psychotherapeutic intervention. In much of this work, mindfulness is understood as a mode of awareness that is present-centered and nonevaluative. This form of awareness is assumed to have intrinsic value in promoting positive mental health and adaptation by interrupting discursive...
Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry
December 1, 2014
Ram P Sapkota, Dristy Gurung, Deepa Neupane et al.
In Nepal, spirit possession is a common phenomenon occurring both in individuals and in groups. To identify the cultural contexts and psychosocial correlates of spirit possession, we conducted a mixed-method study in a village in central Nepal experiencing a cluster of spirit possession events. The study was carried out in three stages: (1) a pilot study consisting of informal interviews with...