Abstract

The Global Integrated Psychiatric Association Psychotherapy of Children in a Multicultural Environment

Author(s): Ramin Mojtabai

The international network of integrative mental health was founded in March and officially released its website in October 2012 to address the current issues affecting mental healthcare. To push a worldwide agenda for evidence-based integrative mental healthcare, our goal was to establish an international association of physicians, researchers, educators, and public healthadvocates. Integrative Mental Health (IMH), a new field, embraces the bio psycho socio spiritual model and uses evidence-based treatments from both conventional healing and cutting edgescientific disciplines. IMH combines “conventional” therapy with evidence based Complementary and Alternative Medicines (CAM) and therapies, lifestyle changes that promote health and theprudent use of psychopharmacology and psychosocial therapies. We are happy to announce that INIMH has partnered with Advances in Integrative Medicine (AIMed). The journal’s guiding principle is in Collaboration with INIMH is possible because both organisations are dedicated to promote a rigorous, evidence-based integrative approach to medicine and mental health. Interest in the connection between ethnicity and child mental health has been rekindled by the diversity of ethnic groups in the increasingly multicultural environment that children live in. The interpretation of data from cross-cultural comparative studies has been the focus of recent writing in cultural child and adolescent psychiatry, raising important questions about conceptual and methodological issues like the cross-cultural validity of diagnostic tools, the role of underlying social and economic variables in accounting for difference, and cultural differences in the interpretation of childhood behaviour. Parents and professionals view children’s behaviour differently, as is well known, but professionals with diverse cultural origins may also have quitevaried expectations for and interpretations of children’s behaviour. Although there is someevidence of childhood illnesses particular to cultures, e mentioned variations in symptomatology. The cross-cultural data examined in the paper mostly relates to research done in the UK, but it also draws on comparable research done in other regions of the world.