As the international community shrinks into a global village, cultures mix, meld, and blur, presenting psychiatric professionals with new challenges: a growing number of patients of different nationalities, ethnicities, and backgrounds. These sociocultural identities, so integral to personality, must be recognized and taken into account when diagnosing and treating mental illness. This is the premise behind transcultural psychiatry.

On the leading edge of an emerging discipline, this compendium by respected clinicians from around the world is one of the first books to offer an in-depth look at transcultural psychiatry. Concise yet comprehensive, "Clinical Methods in Transcultural Psychiatry" draws on a wealth of case studies and relevant clinical experience to provide practicing clinicians with a basic foundation of & ldquo;culturally informed& rdquo; psychiatry on which they can build. Logically organized into six sections, the book begins with an overview of transcultural psychiatry and then moves to the important topic of cultural psychiatry and mental health services. Treatment approaches are addressed next, followed by highlights of recent research; special topics, such as how religious and supernatural beliefs affect behavior; and discussions and recommendations on education and training in transcultural psychiatry. The final section emphasizes families in cultural transition, focusing on the needs of women and children.

Although transcultural psychiatry has never been more relevant than today, most psychiatric textbooks only briefly address it. This fascinating work& mdash;covering everything from the impact of magic and religion in Italy to class, culture, and religionin London& rsquo;s inner city& mdash;familiarizes readers with the principles and practices of transcultural psychiatry, focusing on the significance of cultural factors in the causes and meanings behind the pain and suffering& mdash;as well as the healing& mdash;of mental illness.

Mental illness accounts directly for 14% of the global burden of disease and significantly more indirectly, and recent reports recognise the need to expand and improve mental health delivery on a global basis, especially in low and middle income countries. This text defines an approach to mental healthcare focused on the provision of evidence-based, cost-effective treatments, founded on the principles of sharing the best information about common problems and achieving international equity in coverage, options and outcomes. The coverage spans a diverse range of topics and defines five priority areas for the field. These embrace the domains of global advocacy, systems of development, research progress, capacity building, and monitoring. The book concludes by defining the steps to achieving equality of care globally. This is essential reading for policy makers, administrators, economists and mental health care professionals, and those from the allied professions of sociology, anthropology, international politics and foreign policy.

Over the course of the last decade, political and mental entities at large have embraced global mental health: the idea that psychiatric health is vital to improved quality of life. Physicians globally have implemented guidelines recommended by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in 2007, thereby breaking down barriers to care and improving quality of life in areas where these practices have been implemented. Programs for training and education have expanded as a result. Clinicians benefit more from both local resources in some regions as well as in international collaboration and technological advancements. Even amidst all of these positive outcomes, clinicians still face some stumbling blocks. With worldwide statistics estimating that 450 million people struggle with mental, neuropsychiatric, and neurological disorders-25 percent of the world's non-communicable disease burden-rising to these challenges prove to be no small feat, even in wealthy Western nations. Various articles and books have been published on global mental health, but few of them thoroughly cover the clinical, research, innovative, and social implications as they pertain to psychiatry; often, only one of these aspects is covered. A comprehensive text that can keep pace with the rapidly evolving literature grows more and more valuable each day as clinicians struggle to piece together the changes around the world that leave open the possibility for improved outcomes in care. This book seeks to boldly rectify this situation by identifying innovative models of service delivery, training, education, research funding, and payment systems that have proven to be exemplary in implementation and scalability or have potential for scalability. Chapters describe specific barriers and challenges, illuminating effective strategies for improved outcomes. This text is the first peer-reviewed resource to gather prestigious physicians in global mental health from around the world and disseminate their expertise in the medical community at large in a format that is updateable, making it a truly cutting-edge resource in a world constantly changed by medical, scientific, and technological advances. Innovations in Global Mental Health is the ultimate resource for psychiatrists, psychologists, primary care physicians, hospitalists, policy makers, and all medical professionals at the forefront of global mental health and its implications for the future.