More and more people are being diagnosed with mental disorders. Young people are being medicalized for behaviours that might be explained as entirely normal in other parts of the world. Distress has been commodified over many decades by pharmaceutical companies, the media and the psychiatric establishment. So how can we know when distress is normal and when it is something that needs to be treated?

At AMI’s Annual Mental Health Forum, Dr. Sami Timimi will explore the political and cultural context of these phenomena and will present, instead, a deeply humane approach that looks at the person as a whole – their family context, their culture, their personal resilience – and advocates for a reframing of how we think about and treat distress.

Dr. Sami Timimi is a child and adolescent psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and author. He writes from a critical psychiatry perspective on topics relating to mental health and childhood and has published over a hundred and fifty articles in mainstream medical, educational, and sociological journals. He has written 40 book chapters, mainly in academic books, on subjects related to critical psychiatry, childhood, psychotherapy, depression, behavioural problems and cross-cultural psychiatry, and is the author of seven books, the most recent of which is Searching for Normal: A New Approach to Understanding Mental Health, Distress and Neurodiversity.

We hope you can join us on November 13th!

Co-sponsored with the Department of Psychology and the Centre for Clinical Research in Health (CCRH), Concordia University