(October 19, 2015)

By the end of the presentation, the participant will be able to:

Identify the clinical and social issues raised by the cross-cultural borrowing or adaptation of mindfulness practices.

Discuss Japanese Naikan therapy as a unique form of mindfulness contemplative practice.

Discuss the overlap between ACT and Buddhism/ mindfulness, and their conjoint therapeutic use for Cambodian Canadians

Discuss how cultural interchange between Asian and Western settings may give rise to innovative psychotherapeutic methods that support victims of organized violence.

Inger Agger, PhD, licensed clinical psychologist, is a senior expert and NIAS Associate of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies in Copenhagen. Recently, she concluded a research project in Cambodia in which she explored local Buddhist approaches to healing of violence-related trauma. She also directed a documentary film, Justice and Healing in Cambodia (2012, with S. Roerdam), which she screened and discussed in 2013 in a number of Southeast Asian countries. Dr. Agger has worked extensively with testimony as acknowledgment and healing of violence-related distress and has published two books, The Blue Room: Trauma and Testimony Among Refugee Women (1994), and Trauma and Healing Under State Terrorism (1996, with S. B. Jensen).

Kenneth Fung, MD, FRCPC, MSc, is Staff Psychiatrist and Clinical Director of the Asian Initiative in Mental Health Program, Toronto Western Hospital, University Health Network and Associate Professor with Equity, Gender, and Populations Division, Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto. His primary research, teaching, and clinical interests include both cultural psychiatry and psychotherapy, especially in cultural competence, immigrant mental health, HIV stigma, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. He co-leads Pillar 4 Dialogue of the UT Department of Psychiatry Strategic Plan. He is psychiatric consultant to Hong Fook Mental Health Association and Mon Sheong Scarborough Long-Term Care Centre. He is the President of the Ontario Chapter of the Association of Contextual Behavioral Science, President-Elect of the Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture, and past Chair and current Historian of the Federation of Chinese American and Chinese Canadian Medical Societies.

Laurence J. Kirmayer, MD, is James McGill Professor and Director of the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry, McGill University. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Transcultural Psychiatry. He directs the Culture & Mental Health Research Unit at the Institute of Community and Family Psychiatry, Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, where he conducts research on culturally responsive mental health services, the mental health of indigenous peoples, and the anthropology of psychiatry. He founded and directs the annual McGill Summer Program in Social & Cultural Psychiatry. He co-edited the volumes, Cultural Consultation: Encountering the Other in Mental Health Care (Springer); and Re-Visioning Psychiatry: Cultural Phenomenology, Critical Neuroscience and Global Mental Health (Cambridge). He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.[/author_info] [/author][author] [author_image timthumb='on'][/author_image] [author_info]Chikako Ozawa-de Silva, PhD, is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Emory University. Her researches focus on cross-cultural understandings of health and illness, especially mental illness, by bringing together Western and Asian (particularly Japanese and Tibetan) perspectives on the mind-body, religion, medicine, therapy. She is currently the Principal Investigator of an ethnographic study of Cognitively-Based Compassion Training, funded by the Mind and Life Institute, and was the recipient of an NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) Fellowship. Her publications include one monograph, Psychotherapy and Religion in Japan: The Japanese Introspection Practice of Naikan (Routledge, 2006), and numerous peer-reviewed articles on psychotherapeutic practice, suicide, the mind-body relationship and Tibetan medicine.