Culture and health

Placing Wellbeing

“…Each in their own way, the articles interrogate conventional approaches and understandings of wellbeing; set their analytical focus on the concept of place and place-based imaginaries as they relate to these practices; and highlight that place-specifi city allows for a diff erent and more creative reading of wellbeing. As a set, our articles address recent critical engagements from diff erent disciplinary positions within wellbeing scholarship that: (a) call for a notion of place that is more than 'the context in which wellbeing as an outcome emerges' (Atkinson et al 2012b: 8; see also Napier et al 2014); (b) 'position place as inherently relational in both its production and its infl uence' (Atkinson et al 2012b: 3; see also Schwanen and Atkinson 2015); and that (c) pay att ention to the role that place-making (through relationships, activities, emotions and imaginations) plays in people's sense of wellbeing (see Atkinson et al 2012b for a review of this literature).…”

Research innovations in cultural psychiatry and public mental health

“…Culture is an important and powerful infl uence that shapes beliefs, attitudes, expectation and behaviours; so culture, through these mediators may confer greater risk of illness and can also be a protective infl uence (Napier et al, 2014). This applies to populations as well as patients in contact with services.…”

“…Finally, a PhD student protocol sets out how to undertake the cultural adaptation of an Internetbased suicide intervention for Turkish people, and then test it in a randomized trial design (Eylem et al). The richness of the contributions in terms of cultural and heritage group settings and context, and research in health systems and population studies shows the importance, but also the complexity of cultural determinants of health status and healthcare, and that culture needs to be central to all health research (Napier et al, 2014).…”

Preaching to the choir? Sociodemographic differences in medical students’ evaluation of an undergraduate diversity training module

“…Such barriers do not only stand in the way of effective health care, but are also problematic from a value-based perspective: equitable access to care is a human right. Actively facilitating marginalized groups in the pursuit and enactment of this right is a core responsibility of a socially just medical system and society [1], and should therefore be sustainably integrated in both graduate and undergraduate education [6][7][8][9][10].…”