© Pavilion Publishing (Brighton) Ltd I n September 2005 the 13th World Congress of Psychiatry will take place in Cairo under the title Five Thousand Years of Science and Care: Building the Future of Psychiatry (XIII World Congress of Psychiatry, 2005). Following the 12th World Congress in Yokohama in 2002, a more appropriate subtitle for this year’s event might be Building the Future of the Pha...

In a recent book titled The Grammar of Identity, Stephen Clingman addresses the notion of the “transnational self” as intrinsically transitive or navigational, by which he implies both the internal and external navigation, as well as the navigation between one self and the others. In his view, “navigation does not mean crossing or having crossed, but being in the space of crossing,” as in “acce...

BACKGROUND Virtual patients are now widely accepted as efficient and safe training tools in medical education, but very little is known about their implementation in psychiatry, especially in transcultural clinical care of traumatized refugee patients. OBJECTIVE This study aimed at assessing the impact of training with a virtual patient on confidence in providing clinical care for traumatized...

The purpose of this special section is to describe culturally competent approaches for working with translators or interpreters who participate in transcultural studies. This article provides background for three exemplars of lessons learned in working with translators in transcultural studies: (a) the resettlement transition experiences of women from the Dinka tribe of Southern Sudan (Baird), ...

Alessandro Spina, né Basili Shafik Khouzam, was born in Benghazi in 1927 into a family of Maronites from Aleppo and spent most of his life between Libya and Italy, speaking several languages and writing in Italian. He may be described as the “unsung” writer of Italian colonial and post-colonial past in North Africa. Spina’s oeuvre—collected in an omnibus edition, I confini dell’ombra. In terra ...

The Brain Fag Syndrome (BFS) is defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) as a culture bound syndrome. BFS is a tetrad of somatic complaints; cognitive impairments; sleep related complaints; and other somatic impairments. Prince first described this psychiatric illness associated with study among African students in 1960. There have been questions relating to...

Many Turkish people migrated to Germany between 1955 and 1975. This study was carried out in Göttingen, Germany. Fifty Turkish people (described as patients) were asked about the care they had received from German health care personnel, and 50 German nurses and 50 German physiotherapists were questioned about care they had given to Turkish patients. Significant findings were the needs of the Tu...