The challenge of cultural diversity and psychiatric assessment

Abstract

Background and Aims

Psychiatric diagnosing is a gateway to mental health care for the individual, central to psychiatric research and socially affects the conditions for mental health care delivery for refugees and minority groups. This presentation will discuss: 1) The value of combining psychiatric categorisation with an understanding of patients' cultural life context, and 2) Clinician needs for models supporting the capacity for taking culture into account, and for showing sensitivity to patients' needs, as well as for making psychiatric diagnoses in individualised ways.

Methods

The outline for a Cultural Formulation in DSM-IV (2005, pp. 897-898) is an attempt to construct a clinical model for an idiographic formulation that reviews culture in a systematic way, and pays attention to cultural aspects of presentation and interaction in psychiatric diagnosing. When taking into account patients' culture in Sweden it is often pivotal to pay attention to migration, patients' transitional situation of being uprooted, displaced - often involuntarily - and relocated.

Results and Conclusions

In this presentation preliminary results from a current study on adapting, applying and evaluating the Cultural Formulation in a multicultural milieu in Stockholm/Sweden will be discussed.