Laurence J. Kirmayer

Laurence J. Kirmayer (born October 23, 1952 in Montreal, Quebec) is a Canadian psychiatrist and internationally recognized expert in culture and mental health. He is James McGill Professor and Director of the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada (Academy of Social Sciences) 
From 1991 through 2022, he was Editor-in-Chief of Transcultural Psychiatry, the official journal of the Section on Transcultural Psychiatry of the World Psychiatric Association. Currently, he is Editor-in-Chief Emeritus.
For 2021 to 2023, he was President of the Society for Psychological Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association.
==Career==
Kirmayer completed undergraduate training in psychology (1971-1974) and in medicine (1974-78) at McGill and an internship and residency in psychiatry (1978-81) at the University of California, Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, California. He is a Principal Investigator at the Lady Davis Institute, and Director of the Culture & Mental Health Research Unit at the Institute of Community and Family Psychiatry, Jewish General Hospital in Montreal.
In 1991, he founded the annual McGill Summer Program in Social and Cultural Psychiatrywww.mcgill.ca/tcpsych. In Canada, he also founded the national Network for Aboriginal Mental Health Research www.namhr.ca, the Cultural Consultation Service www.mcgill.ca/ccs, and the online Multicultural Mental Health Resource Centre www.mmhrc.ca
==Work==
His work has contributed to the development of culturally responsive services and interventions in primary care mental health and psychiatry. He has conducted research on the impact of culture and social context on common mental disorders (depression, anxiety, somatization, dissociation, and trauma-related disorders), symptom experience, and processes of resilience, healing and recovery among Indigenous peoples, migrants and marginalized groups. His most recent work has applied theories of embodied and enactive cognitive science to understand the social determinants of health and illness experience and resilience.
He has done epidemiological and ethnographic research on the mental health of Indigenous peoples in collaboration with communities and Indigenous scholars. This includes studies on Inuit concepts of mental health and illness,https://www.mcgill.ca/tcpsych/files/tcpsych/Report4.pdf risk and protective factors for suicide among Inuit youth, Indigenous concepts of resilience,www.mcgill.ca/resilience and mental health promotion for Indigenous youth.www.mcgill.ca/mhp With Gail Guthrie Valaskakis, he edited the first book integrating social science and clinical perspectives on the mental health of Indigenous peoples in Canada.
Much of his early research concerned somatization, the bodily expression of psychiatric, psychological or emotional distress and medically unexplained symptoms. He clarified several distinct definitions of somatization and conducted clinical and community epidemiological studies of the cognitive and social correlates of somatoform disorders. With sociologist James Robbins, he co-developed the Symptom Interpretation Questionnaire, a measure of somatic symptom attribution that predicts high levels of health care utilization, persistent somatization, hypochondriacal worry, low rates of physician detection of psychosocial distress, and chronicity of fatigue in primary care patients.
He also co-developed the McGill Illness Narrative Interview, a method for eliciting and studying explanatory models and help-seeking, which has been translated into over 15 languages and widely used in global mental health and clinical ethnographic research.
He has worked to translate insights from cultural psychology and anthropology into new approaches to thinking about culture and social context in clinical settings. This includes establishing an innovative Cultural Consultation Service (CCS) to address cultural diversity in mental health care in primary and specialty care sectors. The CCS model has been adopted in Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the US and UK. Analysis of CCS data demonstrated the impact of systematic attention to culture on diagnosis and treatment and contributed to the development of the DSM-5 Cultural Formulation Interview. He led workgroups for the Canadian Collaboration for Immigrant and Refugee Health developing guidelines for the primary care prevent and treatment of common mental health problems. For the Canadian Psychiatric Association, he has led workgroups developing guidelines for training in cultural psychiatry and on cultural issues in the psychiatric training of international medical graduates.
Kirmayer also has made contributions to medical and psychological anthropology and the philosophy of psychiatry. He has collaborated on applying 4-E cognitive science to psychiatry and developing a model of cultural affordances in computational neuroscience. He has worked extensively on questions of the cognitive and social process of meaning-making in illness experience, developing theories of metaphoric embodiment and enactment of symptom experience and its ritual and therapeutic transformation. Most recently, he has advocated for an integrative ecosocial approach to understanding mental health and illness.
==Awards==
* 2021	Judd Marmor Award, for contributions advancing the biopsychosocial model, American Psychiatric Association.
* 2020	Distinguished Contribution to Family Systems Research Award, American Family Therapy Academy.
* 2018	Goffredo Bartocci Special Achievement Award, World Association for Cultural Psychiatry.
* 2018	AMI-Québec Exemplary Psychiatrist Award.
* 2016	Walter J. Lonner Distinguished Invited Lecturer, International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology.
* 2015	Fellow, Royal Society of Canada (Social Sciences Division of the Academy of Social Sciences).
* 2015	World Association for Cultural Psychiatry Creative Scholarship Award for “Cultural Consultation: Encountering the Other in Mental Health Care.”
* 2014	Dr. Praful Chandarana Award, Indo-Canadian Psychiatric Association.
* 2013	Fellow, Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.
* 2010	Lifetime Achievement Award, Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture.
* 2006	Creative Scholarship Award, Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture.
* 2004	Presidential commendation for dedication in advancing cultural psychiatry, Canadian Psychiatric Association.
== Bibliography ==
His publications include over 400 articles and book chapters as well as several co-edited volumes:
* Current Concepts of Somatization: Research and Clinical Perspectives, edited by Laurence J. Kirmayer and James M. Robbins. Washington: American Psychiatric Association, 1991. 
*Understanding Trauma: Integrating Biological, Clinical and Cultural Perspectives, edited by Laurence J. Kirmayer, Robert Lemelson, & Mark Barad. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 
* Healing Traditions: The Mental Health of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada, edited by Laurence J. Kirmayer and Gail Guthrie Valaskakis. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009. 
* Cultural Consultation: Encountering the Other in Mental Health Care, edited by Laurence J. Kirmayer, Jaswant Guzder, and Cécile Rousseau. New York: Springer, 2013. 
* Revisioning Psychiatry: Cultural Phenomenology, Critical Neuroscience, and Global Mental Health, edited by Laurence J. Kirmayer, Robert Lemelson, and Constance A. Cummings. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 
* DSM-5® Handbook on the Cultural Formulation Interview, edited by Robert Lewis-Fernandez, Neil Krishan Aggarwal, Ladson Hinton, Devon Hinton and Laurence J. Kirmayer. Washington: American Psychiatric Pub, 2015. 
* Cultural Clinical Psychology and PTSD. edited by Andreas Maercker, Eva Heim, and Laurence J. Kirmayer. Boston: Hogrefe Publishing GmbH, 2019 
* Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Models and Applications, edited by Laurence J. Kirmayer, Carol M. Worthman, Shinobu Kitayama, Robert Lemelson, and Constance A. Cummings. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 
==Lectures==
Video recordings of Kirmayer's lectures in cultural psychiatry are available online
Category:1952 births
Category:Canadian people
Category:Canadian psychiatrists