50 - Cultural Psychiatry Training

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the cultural psychiatry training. In addition to general resident training programs, some institutions have provided special programs in cultural psychiatry at advanced levels. However, there is no concurrence among experts in the field on how to offer cultural psychiatric training to all psychiatric residents. In the United States, effective January 2001, the revised accreditation standards set up by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education Program Requirements for Residency Training in Psychiatry include several key innovations in cultural psychiatry training. Beyond basic cultural psychiatric training for all psychiatrists-in-training, there is a need to form an advanced training program for those who are interested in cultural psychiatry as a professional specialty or for their career development. The cultural dimensions of psychiatry will certainly be highlighted when a trainee directly and practically experiences the impact of culture on psychiatric practice. While it is better to spend a longer period of time gaining a deep understanding of one of two cultural settings, it is also useful to have encounters with multiple, diverse cultural systems. It can certainly help trainees to learn the differences even within one's own country or neighborhood, as there are many culturally diverse people, who may be immigrants or refugees from other cultures, indigenous people, or socioculturally deprived people who live in different socioeconomic-cultural settings. Working with such diversified subcultural groups could have a learning effect similar to actually living in another society. This kind of experience may be supplemented by short-term travel or visits to other countries to experience the cultures in their home settings.