The Culture Gap

Dr. Jabr is a Palestinian psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and former Head of the Mental Health Unit at the Palestinian Ministry of Health. She's also the author of several books on mental health under occupation, including her latest, Radiance in Pain and Resilience: The Global Reverberation of Palestinian Historical Trauma.In this conversation, we talk about what it means to practice psychiatry under occupation. Dr. Jabr discusses the challenges of her work and the importance of bearing witness to collective trauma.

Yasmin grew up covering her vitiligo with makeup, terrified of being seen without it. In this episode, she opens up about camouflaging her condition for two decades, the cultural beliefs and societal pressures that shaped how she understood it, and the turning point that helped her to embrace her skin.

In 1947, patients in mental asylums across India and Pakistan were swapped between institutions when the border was redrawn. A historical event that most people have never heard of.Saadat Hasan Manto, one of the most celebrated Urdu writers of the time, wrote a short story based on this called "Toba Tek Singh," one of the most devastating tales to come out of Partition. In this episode, psychiatrist Dr. Tahir Jokinen joins us to unpack the story through the lens of mental illness.We also get into why frameworks like PTSD fall short of capturing what partition actually did to people, why the psychological literature on this took decades to appear, and what it means for a "madman" to be the only character in a story who makes sense of the madness around him.

What's the link between Vodou, black liberation psychology, and Haitian mental health?In this episode of The Culture Gap, recorded live from New York, we sit down with Dr. Evan Auguste, a Haitian-American forensic psychologist, assistant professor and author, to trace the hidden history connecting Haiti's revolutionary past to the mental health system we live with today.

Hello from New York! I'm a Londoner enjoying a week in NYC. I recorded a very exciting guest episode, but before we release it at the end of this month, we're doing a brief pitstop to ask ourselves - how do we manage our mental well-being in the world's busiest cities?