This is my presentation to the Webinar and Townhall Meeting of the Family & Culture Special Interest Group of the World Association of Cultural Psychiatry (WACP) Saturday, April 2, 2022 DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.35540.27523 To view the video of the webinar presentation and town hall meeting, please see: https://waculturalpsy.org/wacp-news/video-of-webinar-of-4-2-22-on-family-culture/ Or directly on youtube: https://youtu.be/doltJ1VTV38

1. World Association of Cultural Psychiatry (WACP)
President: Roberto Lewis-Fernández
Family & Culture
Special Interest Group
Co-chairs: V. Di Nicola & R. Al-Baldawi
Culture, Families & Psychosis
Webinar
Saturday, April 2, 2022

3. Vincenzo Di Nicola
MPhil, MD, PhD, FRCPC, DLFAPA, FCPA, FCAHS
Professor of Psychiatry
University of Montreal & The George Washington University
Honorary Chair & Professor of Social Psychiatry
Ambrosiana University

4. Conflicts of Interests
None of the presenters or moderators have
any conflicts of interest to declare

5. 6TH WORLD CONGRESS OF THE
WORLD ASSOCIATION OF
CULTURAL PSYCHIATRY
ROTTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS
14 - 17 September 2022

6. Family & Culture Special Interest Group
Co-chairs: V Di Nicola & R Al-Baldawi
Our mission in the Family & Culture Special Interest
Group is:
To bring together mental health professionals and
scholars in cognate fields
With special interests in the family and culture, how
they relate to and enrich each other, and
How to study, investigate, and promote research,
teaching, practices, advocacy and policy-making to
advance the study of the family in a cultural context

7. Without a family approach, without culture …
something’s missing …

8. Culture, Families & Psychosis
Should the involvement of the person’s
family in the treatment of psychosis
be adapted to their cultural background?
And if so, how?

9. Not a rhetorical question
The answer is not taken for granted
I want to emphasize that we can best address
it as an interface, an interaction
Lived experience of anything – anxiety,
depression, psychosis, trauma – is best
understood as taking place at the crossroads
of significant social contexts and cultural
processes
Culture, Families & Psychosis

10. Three Lenses
Psychosis
Families
Culture
Lived experience is at the crossroads

11. Salient history
Schizophrenia has been called the “sublime
object of psychiatry” (Woods, 2011)
Classification era: Kraepelin (1893), Bleuler
(1908), Jaspers (1913), Schneider (1939)
Social context era: Norman Cameron, Gregory
Bateson, RD Laing, Silvano Arieti
Family therapy era: Mara Selvini Palazzoli’s
“Road map to Schizo-land”
Culture, Families & Psychosis

13. Norman Cameron
“paranoid pseudo-community” (1943, 1959)
Gregory Bateson
“double bind hypothesis” (1956)
RD Laing (1960, 1969)
“ontological insecurity”
“mystification,” “invalidation”
Silvano Arieti (1975)
“interpretation of schizophrenia”
“biopsychosocial approach”
Social Context Era

14. Three Lenses
Interaction of families and psychosis
Psychosis
Families
Culture

15. Mara Selvini Palazzoli (1978, 1989)
“Road map to Schizo-land” (Di Nicola, 1984)
Paradox and Counterparadox: A New Model in
the Therapy of the Family in Schizophrenic
Transaction (1978)
“counterparadoxical interventions”
Family Games: General Models of Psychotic
Processes in the Family (1989)
“universal prescription”
Family Therapy Era

16. Three Lenses
Interaction of culture and psychosis
Psychosis
Families
Culture

17. George Brown – sociologist (1972)
Julian Leff (1985) – social psychiatrist
Five components
Critical comments
Hostility
Emotional overinvolvement (EOI)
Warmth
Positive regard
Cultural critique – Di Nicola (1988)
Expressed Emotion (EE)

18. Family
I see humanity as a family
that has hardly met.
– Theodore Zeldin
An Intimate History of Humanity

19. Acknowledgements
WACP Officers
Dr. Roberto Lewis-Fernándo, WACP President
Dr. Riyadh Al-Baldawi,
SiG Co-chair
Dr. Hans Rohlof,
WACP Treasurer
Image courtesy of Jaswant Guzder

20. 6TH WORLD CONGRESS OF THE
WORLD ASSOCIATION OF
CULTURAL PSYCHIATRY
ROTTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS
14 - 17 September 2022