Journal of Psychiatry

Building cross-cultural patient-physician trust through discourse: Re-inventing doctor-patient narrative from an anthropological perspective

19^th Global Congress on Pediatricians & Child Psychiatry

July 12-13, 2017 Chicago, USA

Maree Sugai

Tohoku University, Japan

Keynote: J Psychiatry

Abstract:

Discourse analysis of doctor-child narrative in clinical setting can be used to identify primal cultural assumptions that may affect understanding of psychosomatic symptoms. Patient-doctor narrative is coded and broken down to uncover themes and meta-themes that matter most to the child within their individual, diverse, multi-cultural and socio-cultural experience of their illness. Narrative is analyzed through qualitative data software transcript and researcher�??s observation memos including identification of social conflict components, cultural contradictions, irregularities of thought pattern affected by interactive reaction or question, patterns of social control, missing or with-held information, moments and triggers of fluster, cumulative recognition of triggers of antagonism or pain. These linguistic clues are then split and, or, lumped into a similarity matrix utilizing multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) and cluster analysis to illuminate emic meaning and contribute to a more successful outcome of patient description and practitioner�??s understanding of symptoms prior to diagnosis. Methods include oral history, focus groups, participant observation, field notes, MAXQDA software analysis, and semi-structured interviews in Japan.

Biography :

Maree Sugai is an Associate Professor, Faculty Member and Researcher of Ethno-psychiatry at Tohoku University of Community Service and Science in Japan. She studied at West of England University Bristol, UK, Reading University, UK and Creighton University, USA. Her academic background is in Socio-Linguistics and Medical Anthropology and her thesis was in Intercultural Communication. She has taught undergraduate, graduate and post graduate level classes in English, Academic Writing, Intercultural Communication, and Comparative Psychiatry at Tohoku University School of Medicine, Tohoku Gakuin University and at Tohoku University of Community Service and Science. She has worked as a Director on the Board of Governors for the NPO Mental Health Rehabilitation Center Kokoroya in Sendai, Japan for fifteen years. She has published on health as a human right in the American International Journal of Social Sciences, psychology and behavioral science journals, and is dedicated to equity in health services and open access research information sharing. She is Director of Health Care for the Global Listening Centre and also Vice Director of the International Global Exchange Center promoting cultural exchange immersion studies for undergraduate and graduate university students in language and culture, and for occupational therapy doctorate student exchange programs in rural Japan.

Email: mareesugai@yahoo.com