Laurence Kirmayer, MD

Laurence J. Kirmayer, M.D. is Professor and Director, Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University and Editor-in-Chief of Transcultural Psychiatry. He also directs the Culture and Mental Health Research Unit at the Department of Psychiatry, Sir Mortimer B. Davis Jewish General Hospital in Montréal where he conducts research on the mental health of Aboriginal peoples; mental health services for immigrants and refugees; consultation- liaison psychiatry; and the anthropology of psychiatry. Dr. Kirmayer's past research includes studies on: concepts of mental health and illness in Inuit communities; risk and protective factors for suicide among Inuit youth in Nunavik; barriers to mental health care for immigrants; somatization in primary care; the comparative study of psychiatry in Canada and Japan; and the role of metaphor in psychiatric theory. He directs the annual Summer Program and Advanced Study Institute in Social and Cultural Psychiatry at McGill. He is co-editor of the volumes, Current Concepts of Somatization (American Psychiatric Press, 1991), Healing Traditions: The Mental Health of Canadian Aboriginal Peoples (University of British Columbia Press, in press). Dr. Kirmayer's current projects include suicide prevention for Aboriginal peoples; the use of the cultural formulation in clinical assessment and cultural consultation; and the cross-national comparative study of mental health services for cultural diverse populations.