Introduction

Summary

The death of George Floyd in 2020 spurred the Black Lives Matter movement and generated widespread social consciousness about the persistence of institutional racism in its many forms and the impact it has had in creating disparities in healthcare, education and criminal justice. One significant response was in the push for educational reforms, particularly in North America and parts of Europe, to decolonise. This book continues the decolonising work done in the pioneering field of cultural psychiatry, focusing on the UK context. Cultural psychiatry has made headway in decolonising former traditions of psychiatry. A gap that needs to be addressed with some urgency, however, is the representation of views of non-white psychiatrists. An assumption when discussing therapeutic relationships is that the patient is from an ethnic minority background, often from a BAME group, and by implication, the psychiatrist is white and from the majority group. The second part of this assumption overlooks the experiences of psychiatrists from non-white ethnicities, and it is this that defines the scope of the book. Elicited through interview, the accounts explored the lived experiences of South Asian psychiatrists in the UK, negotiating the shifts between their cultural identities especially framed as the culture of their ethnicity and British culture.