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lectures > lectures autumn 2002

Healing the Mind: A cross-cultural view

Speaker: Professor Julian Leff
19th October 2002

While the fundamental emotions are recognised across cultures, there are striking differences in the way in which people from various cultures express their distress. In particular, bodily experiences are given a greater emphasis by some groups than by others. These differences are reflected in the language of emotion; alternatively, does language shape the expression of emotional discomfort?

Healing emotional distress is a major activity in western biomedicine and in traditional medicine. However, the approaches are very different, depending on the concepts of illness held by healers from the two cultures. Are traditional ways of dealing with distress more effective than scientific medicine, and if so, how can we preserve them?

Julian Leff has conducted research in social psychiatry for the past 35 years at the Institute of Psychiatry, London. He has a particular interest in the practice of psychiatry in different cultures, and the susceptibility to mental illness of ethnic minority groups. He has been a consultant to the World Health Organisation, which has given him the opportunity to study traditional healers in other cultures.

He was awarded the Starkey Prize of the Royal Society of Health in 1976, and the Burgholzli Award of the University of Zurich in 1999. He has published numerous papers and articles in scientific journals and has written ten books. The latest, his first popular book, is entitled The Unbalanced Mind.