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>> Well Coursera, we have covered a lot of ground.
Culture, mental health, mental illness, indigenous, traditional, universal, what
else? Idioms of distress, cultural formulations,
culture bound syndromes, in pre-list agendas, it was a lot of ground.
[laugh] It was a lot of ground. This is a really interesting area to me
how culture interplays with mental health. And the thing is, it's still largely
defined by an understanding of culture that's rooted in ethnicity and
nationality. There's so much more work to be done and
work that is being done in terms of thinking about culture, mental health,
mental illness, and cultural competence, as it relates to other types of culture.
The kind of culture that's associated with gender.
The kind of culture that's associated with sexuality.
The kind of culture that's associated with education, socioeconomic status, so many
things. We're all really complex individuals and
we all represent many different cultures at the same time.
And these have implications for the way that we think about mental health, the way
we deal with mental illness, the ways that we stay mentally healthy.
So, I hope you got a sense of that from this lecture.
So next week, we are going to be talking about families and mental health, and
mental illness. This is a very interesting area.
[laugh] That's the word I'll use. Interesting.
Because a lot of the work that I do around families and mental illness has to do with
care giving. So that's certainly what we're going to
talk about. It's going to be part of what we talk
about. But I know in the forums that there has
been some discussion about how families are intertwined with the experience of
mental illness. And, that is a difficult topic because
psychiatry and mental health has had an unfortunate history of really blaming
families when it came to mental illness. And, you know, in this regard, I think the
mother has got it especially hard because so many of these theories talked about
what mothers didn't do and how that caused mental illness.
So, I've decided that I am going to talk about that next week.
I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to take it on, but its out there, I've seen
it in the discussion forums, we'll see what we can do.
[laugh] And, and certainly, of course, I'm going to talk about the care giving
experience. I know there are lot of family members in
this course. And I hope that I will get to hear from
you guys in response to that lecture, and I hope, and I have seen that you're
talking with each other. And it's been great to see that
interraction. So, I'll see you next week.
Charmaine WilliamsAssociate Professor
