How Our Blindness to Context Harms Patients and Breaks Practitioners: A Conversation With Kamaldeep Bhui

About this episode

Kamaldeep Bhui discusses the importance of context and cultural understanding in mental health care.

Kamaldeep Bhui is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford and Honorary Professor at Queen Mary University of London. He is internationally recognized for his groundbreaking work on cultural psychiatry, ethnic inequalities in mental health, and the social determinants of distress. In recognition of his contributions to mental health research and policy, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). He has written extensively on the grim reality of minorities facing higher rates of psychiatric detention and coercion. In an era of algorithmic checklists and time-pressured care, Bhui argues for reclaiming biographical listening and patients' own stories and understandings. Without cherishing lived experience, clinicians lose meaning in their work and patients lose agency, trust, and hope. In this interview, we will discuss how our contexts and culture reach deep within us to inform our experience of pain, and to indicate what is abnormal, why we feel distress, and what it means to heal. *** Thank you for being with us to listen to the podcast and read our articles this year. MIA is funded entirely by reader donations. If you value MIA, please help…

People in this episode

Host: Mad in America

Guest: Kamaldeep Bhui

Topics covered

• cultural psychiatry
• mental health
• social determinants of distress
• patient agency
• biographical listening

Keywords

• mental health
• cultural psychiatry
• ethnic inequalities
• distress
• biographical listening

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: University of Oxford, Queen Mary University of London, CBE

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