Laurence Kirmayer

Laurence J. Kirmayer

Laurence J. Kirmayer MD FRCPC FCAHS FRSC

James McGill Professor & Director
Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry
McGill University
Editor-in-Chief, Transcultural Psychiatry
Director, Culture & Mental Health Research Unit
Institute of Community & Family Psychiatry
Jewish General Hospital
Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Laurence J. Kirmayer, MD, FRCPC, FCAHS, FRSC is James McGill Professor and Director, Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University. He is Editor-in-Chief of Transcultural Psychiatry, and Director of the Culture & Mental Health Research Unit at the Institute of Community and Family Psychiatry, Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, where he conducts research on culturally responsive mental health services for immigrants and refugees, the mental health of Indigenous peoples, and the philosophy of psychiatry.

He founded and directs the annual Summer Program and Advanced Study Institute in Cultural Psychiatry at McGill. He also founded and directs the Network for Aboriginal Mental Health Research. His past research includes studies on cultural consultation, pathways and barriers to mental health care for immigrants and refugees, somatization in primary care, cultural concepts of mental health and illness in Inuit communities, risk and protective factors for suicide among Inuit youth, and resilience among Indigenous peoples. Current projects include: mental health promotion for Indigenous youth; the integration of ethnography and neuroscience in global mental health; and models of mental health services for multicultural societies. He co-edited the volumes: Understanding Trauma: Integrating Biological, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives (Cambridge University Press), and Healing Traditions: The Mental Health of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada (University of British Columbia Press); Cultural Consultation: Encountering the Other in Mental Health Care (Springer); the DSM-5 Handbook for the Cultural Formulation Interview (APPI): and Re-Visioning Psychiatry: Cultural Phenomenology, Critical Neuroscience and Global Mental Health (Cambridge) . He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada.

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