 So welcome to all of you, welcome to, I'm Lawrence Kermair. This is part of the annual McGill Summer Program in Social and Cultural Psychiatry. I'll tell you more about that. This specific course slash workshop is Social and Cultural Neuroscience. This is the first time that we've done this particular topic in this way, so it's kind of an experiment. We hope this, just as the summer program has been an annual event, we hope this will be an annual event and it'll be a kind of meeting place for people sharing interests in this broad area. And I'm going to take about 10 minutes to tell you about this and about the idea behind this particular workshop. And then, as I say, we'll take about half an hour, so there's about 30 people in this workshop for each of you to go around and in about one minute introduce yourself in terms of where you're from and something about your background or your interests. And that will be important for those of us who are presenting to sort of orient ourselves and try to speak to your interests and also to make each other aware because one of the great pleasures of this summer program over the years has been the opportunity to meet people from all over the world who share common interests and it's a very special kind of opportunity because people are self-selected to be right at the intersection of these different topics that we're going to be addressing. So this workshop occurs in the context of the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill, which is a program within the Department of Psychiatry in the 1950s because many people were coming to train at McGill, particularly from former Commonwealth countries, Hong Kong and Malaysia and East Africa and so on, and they raised issues about the applicability of what they were learning and psychiatry to the context that they were working in. So rather than just proceeding that as an obstacle to sort of knowledge translation to sort of bring the, you know, the enlightenment of the West to the rest of the world, it was seen as an opportunity to really have a dialogue and to begin to learn from mental health experiences in different contexts. And so the people who sort of began this program are Whit Cower from Psychiatry, Jack Freed from Anthropology, started a newsletter with people who trained at McGill and gone back home to start sharing experiences and they did early studies asking people to describe people with depression that you're seeing in different parts of the world and just sort of this open-ended kind of exploration, which evolved into other projects like the International Pilot Study of Depression and Schizophrenia and so on. So the program has continued, but the focus has really shifted in a way because when I took over in 1991 from my immediate predecessor, Ray Prince, he said, oh, you can't do trans-culture psychiatry in Montreal. You have to go to some other part of the world. So it was still like the legacy of that colonial mentality that culture is over there. It's, you know, we just do things the way things are supposed to be done and then everybody else has culture, and we do something in some kind of odd way that we have to make sense of. So that has really changed, I think, pretty fundamentally in our thinking and that came out of changes in the nature of anthropology itself and other social sciences, and then certainly within psychiatry there's much more reflection on this process. And so this network of about 45 people around McGill who share different degrees of engagement with these questions has become a kind of hub for activities that are not only addressing global mental health but addressing vulnerable populations like migrants and indigenous peoples but also looking at the anthropology and philosophy of psychiatry itself with the notion that psychiatry is a cultural construction and it has a history, and the better we understand that even if we're primarily concerned with issues of knowledge translation and meeting the clinical needs of people in different settings the more we understand where we're coming from if we're using the tools of conventional mental health the more we open up a space for dialogue and the possibility of learning from each other in adaptation. So that's the underlying clinical set of questions. As you know, psychiatry aims to be a medical science in the sense that it's trying to develop a body of knowledge that can be used to address problems and increasingly psychiatry since the 80s has really embraced the notion that neuroscience is going to give us the answers we need. And I should say that many of us here are skeptical that neuroscience will ever give us all the answers we need understanding that neuroscience will give us some of the answers we need and this course is devoted to exactly addressing the basic science questions behind that in terms of in what ways does social context affect the brain and affect mental health problems. This is occurring as I mentioned in the context of our summer program in social and cultural psychiatry which we just this is the 24th year that we've had this summer school next year will be the 25th we're going to have some kind of a gala event we haven't quite figured that out yet but actually the overall theme will have the same usual courses that we have the overall theme will be the poetics cultural poetics of illness and healing because that will give us a chance to make something a little more playful than we sometimes have and within that summer school we have a series of courses in cultural psychiatry and qualitative research methods and global mental health and mental health indigenous peoples and so on and so forth, in fact next week is a workshop on the mental health of indigenous people for those of you who may be interested in that topic and we also have every year an advanced study institute on a particular theme and so this year that was on a very timely issue of migrant detention with people from UNHCR and Oxford Refugee Studies and people over the world looking at these huge human rights issues and policy issues that the world is kind of seized by right now and which are in fact only going to get more intense because of global warming and so on. Some years ago we started within the summer school it keeps getting, the original idea of the summer school was we would have one very intense month people would come from all over we could do our teaching and then we would be done the rest of the year it was very self-interested and very cool but it keeps expanding and getting more complicated so now it's two months, all of May is the main courses and then we have workshops in June and now we're having these two workshops in August and so the idea is kind of falling apart in terms of, you know, at least my time management so we have to rethink that and any of that, a number of years ago we started a workshop on critical neuroscience led by Soparna Choudhury and that is really the social science of neuroscience that is it really focuses on how is knowledge being produced within neuroscience what are the social consequences of that and how is it being applied what assumptions does it make and so on and because Soparna herself is trained originally as a developmental cognitive neuroscientist for her this is something that's not set in opposition to neuroscience or kind of one-upping neuroscience but something that can exist as a kind of self-reflective process and dialogue of neuroscience that can enrich and refine what people are actually doing that's the aspiration so that workshop has gone on for several years this is the first time that we have a workshop that's oriented differently it's really more at the nitty-gritty of putting social science and neuroscience together to formulate and ask and answer interesting questions about the nature of human functioning so hopefully these two things will go on they're complementary and they'll continue to go on as separate week-long workshops because, you know, there's lots of material to talk about so that already took place this is the book that Soparna and Jan Slavy did some years ago that kind of mapped out this orientation we could call it of critical neuroscience the other sponsor of this particular workshop is the Global Mental Health Program at McGill which is one of several global health programs that tries to create opportunities for international collaboration and development of research knowledge and training experiences for people in medicine at the medical student and resident and postgraduate level and this is, as you know, a kind of booming field it's become the branding of the moment in terms of global health global mental health our own interest in this area is really to bring precisely the critical social science perspective that I mentioned to the project of global mental health because global mental health in the mainstream has been framed primarily as translating knowledge that is produced in the north the global north to other contexts and settings and we're interested in sort of problematizing that there's one chair up here there's two chairs up here and we can move a chair maybe back there for somebody else and I hope we'll have enough chairs here so so welcome to all of you the program as I mentioned here is within the McGill departments psychiatry those are very interdisciplinary program they're people from anthropology, sociology, philosophy, social work, many many different faculties we're very fortunate this year in having some support from a private foundation based in Los Angeles the foundation for psychocultural research and Dr. Connie Cummings who's sitting in the corner there the project director for this and other activities of the foundation the foundation was founded by an anthropologist, Dr. Robert Lemelson who has a passion and interest in trying to bring ethnography together with psychology, developmental psychology social and cultural psychology and anthropology and neuroscience I should say to put all those together in some way and so for a number of years he's had through his philanthropy training opportunities for people to become kind of interdisciplinary in some ways and that's been a successful process as this thing has gone on over 15 years or so the field has kind of grown up we have journals and we have you'll hear about lots of different activities at these intersections between social psychology and anthropology and neuroscience and the foundation is sponsoring this workshop so we were able to bring in a lot of guest faculty introducing as we go along and also hopefully we'll be moving towards supporting a kind of network of different centers including our program at McGill and some others again that you'll hear about that we'll be able to create collaborative projects and training opportunities for students so it's another way we hope that this activity will not just be a one off here at McGill but we'll be part of a larger network of activities it'll be synergistic in some ways because it seems like the time is ripe McGill that makes this particularly timely is two years ago McGill received a very large grant from something called the Canada First Research Excellence Foundation or Fund which aims to provide support for a big neuroscience research program centered around neuroinformatics and this is called Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives and it has a social science component and I chair the social science component so this activity is another opportunity again to kind of feed into Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives and to draw from some of those resources and social science is important for that program because of its huge ambitions in terms of over a seven year period generating new knowledge in neuroscience that will have impact on how we practice clinically on public health issues and indeed on wider social policy issues so you can imagine how both the critical neuroscience workshop that I mentioned and some of the many things we'll be talking about in this week are very important to these concerns of Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives so let me just say a couple of conceptual words you're going to be hearing from people from many different disciplines and backgrounds many different orientations most of the invited faculty are not part of our particular program here they don't necessarily think about these things the way that we do so I hope that you're going to get in fact a very rich pluralistic kind of view of the field in different points of view what I will suggest is the common element among all the people that you'll be hearing from is an interest in interdisciplinarity transdisciplinarity multidisciplinarity putting together different perspectives and the methodological tools and the conceptual frameworks of different perspectives to grapple with big questions about the nature of human functioning in health and illness so that's broadly speaking the common element of course the challenge is to go from the lofty goal of this interdisciplinarity to the pragmatics of how you can actually do that in a meaningful way that doesn't just water down what's going on and the general dilemma we have and we certainly have in the context of this HBHL program is the neuroscience is methodologically extremely sophisticated there have been dramatic advances at the level of methodology and it's it's not hard to generate reams of data social science depending on which area of social science it is has methodology has been much more shaky in some areas are not equally developed or certainly when it does exist in a very refined way it's not been brought to bear on the same questions so the challenge is can we bring comparable levels of sophistication in our theoretical thinking and our methodological tools to how we frame questions and that's the long-term aspiration we think of having this kind of a workshop for several years we're hoping that that's what we're doing we're sort of upskilling all of us both in terms of our theoretical frameworks and the tools we have available to create a different level of opportunity for collaboration and this is just a slide making the point that the reason we have social neuroscience and cultural neuroscience is because the human brain is fundamentally the organ of sociality the organ of culture that's what it's there for and that's true on many different levels it's true phylogenetically in the sense that we've evolved to be social cultural beings and so that's what's distinctive about the configuration of our brain it's there on a co-volutionary level you'll be hearing some dramatic examples of that from Shinobu Kitayama this afternoon we live in humanly designed niches and we adapt to those niches rather than to some kind of abstract a generic environment and so our brains increasingly reflect exactly the kinds of social worlds that we have constructed for ourselves and we were talking last night about the effects of social media something that Samuel Vissier is studying in terms of what the next phase of our evolution will look like given that we're glued to our phones all the time and so on there are these other time scales that are very important to those of us who are psychologically oriented to clinicians who are working with people and in the throes of their everyday lives dealing with their biographical trajectories dealing with their efforts to adapt to particular social context so you can think of all these as representing different time scales over which the brain and body are adapting and configuring themselves to particular social contexts and the word culture has meaning at each of these levels in a sense each of these time scales and maybe it requires different tools and different measures to capture some of those things would lead to very different hypotheses about how we are either shaped to come at an environment already in a particular way or are adapting and developing new skills and adapting in a very fluid and plastic way improvising as it were to new environments the big implication and what I'm constantly personally feeling like I have to keep selling to my colleagues who are working with a very well-defined paradigm that they can confine within the laboratory walls is that the human mind insofar as we want to use that abstraction about cognitive processes traverses is not confined within the skull but traverses loops between each other and between the social world and again I think that will be a common element in many of the presentations you'll hear that thinking that way is enlightening in terms of getting a clear sense of what we're talking about and certainly from the point of view of psychiatry where we're dealing with people in their everyday lives in their different social millions that's precisely the kind of theory that we need it's not sufficient to have a theory of oh there's too much or too little activity in this region of the brain that kind of decontextualized thinking leads I think to a lot of problems that mostly that we're hiding from at the moment but that are going to make things very difficult as time goes on if we don't come to terms with that better. So I won't belabor this just to say that you can think of the links between social science and neuroscience at two levels social science in neuroscience that is bringing things together to address these basic questions and I've already mentioned the critical neuroscience perspective which is kind of social science of neuroscience standing back and saying what's going on here and why are people framing questions certain ways and so on and we think even though this is not the critical neuroscience of neuroscience of course you're going to see a lot of that kind of reflection going on and how that enlarges our discussion of particular paradigms. There's a lot of discussion in public health and global health around the notion of social determinants of health because it's not hard to show that some of the most powerful determinants of health reside in the social world it has to do with our nature again as social beings and what's interesting is every one of these factors which are sometimes treated as structural and economic and sort of the brute facts of human existence, poverty, racism and so on, every one of these has a cultural dimension in the sense that it depends on how people interpret and perceive their world and how they act in that world. So something like race and caste and so on, these things are cultural constructions in the sense that it takes a certain set of social practices a certain set of interpretive frames to put that into motion and to lead to the kinds of very serious social structural consequences that ensue that have dramatic effects on people's health. I'm going to stop. The other sort of institutional context I should mention briefly is within our Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry we have now a program called Culture, Mind and Brain that Samuel Vesier and Soprano Charduri who's not here today and myself sort of co-direct and we see this as a platform that will bring together the people from neuroscience from other disciplines hopefully with some support from the Foundation for Psychocultural Research from Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives to create a kind of fertile exchange and so we see this workshop again as an activity within that framework we've been having an ongoing kind of seminar series, I think Michael Liffschitz is here who got one of his seminars up there as an example and Fernando Vidal and we have a variety of ongoing or emerging projects in this area I'll just show them briefly, you'll have opportunity to talk to people about these as we go along I'm almost finished and this program also exists with collaborations at various stages of development many of them potential but anyway collaborations with many different institutions and again that's the kind of network that we're building so structurally this is kind of what the week will look like there's a couple of changes I'll describe in a moment and the idea really is for a series of discussions and hopefully dialogue with all of you here to explore some facets of these broad range of topics this is a graduate level workshop or seminar so we're aiming for a high level of discussion that's a challenge because time is short and because you are a very diverse group everybody has a different level of sophistication in different areas some of you are experts in several areas and neophytes and others so probably there are going to be moments when people say things that they assume are clear that are opaque and I would encourage you to please ask for clarification because there are probably other people in the room who are also not following at that moment but I've asked the speakers really all to aim at very high level because we think the main function of this is of course not prerequisite for anything it's really to stimulate all of you to give you a sense of what's going on and where to look to find out more