Ethnography as a Clinical Tool: Cultural Psychiatry and the Asylum Process

This episode of Migrant Ethnographies features a conversation between our host, Nathan Ferguson, and Grace Davis and Eric Jarvis, two members of the Jewish General Hospital’s Cultural Consultation Service (CCS). We speak about a unique form of patient-centered ethnography practiced at the CCS, one which blends the practical toolkit of psychiatry with the conceptual resources of anthropology. We also speak about the origins of the consultation service in McGill University’s Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, and we discuss how this interdisciplinary subfield of psychiatric medicine provides the foundations for a new approach to clinical interviews — especially in its keen sensitivity to structural conditions and social contexts. What does it mean for an institution to solicit narrative history from migrants and their communities? How can this effort in meaning-making be therapeutic or empowering? How can it be coercive and traumatizing? And what steps can be taken to improve it?
Migrant Ethnographies is a new semi-academic podcast featuring qualitative research on migration. Through stories, practices, and grounded theories, Migrant Ethnographies explores the lived realities of migration and the evolving journey of ethnographic research. Each podcast episode is recorded by a Concordia University graduate student who works on a topic related to migration with guidance from Dr. Deniz Duruiz.   Special thanks to the Ethnography Lab and the Milieux Institute at Concordia University for providing access to the recording equipment used in this episode. We’re also grateful to Erik Ziomko, a Montreal-based artist, for our podcast’s theme music, Respect, which is available on SoundCloud. We’d love to hear from you! Share your comments, ideas, or proposals at ⁠[e-mail]⁠
Host:Nathan Ferguson is a Master’s candidate at Concordia University’s department of Sociology and Anthropology. His thesis research seeks to describe and interpret the role of the body in the field of transcultural psychiatry. He is also a member of the Montreal Waterways Collective, a research group dedicated to exploring the status and meaning of water in urban environments. 
Guests: Grace Davis is a peer support worker, based out of the Jewish General Hospital's Institute for Community and Family Psychiatry. She is associated with the Center-West Island branch of Montreal's integrated healthcare network, where she specializes in direct peer support work with patients, and also serves as a consultant on special projects. Davis has been involved for two years with the Cultural Consultation Service’s interdisciplinary case conferences. In her contributions to these conferences, she helps the consultation team build their understanding of patients’ experiences and predicaments, through a sensitivity to relevant social contexts and structures. As well as her academic and professional knowledge, she also accesses her own lived experience, as a senior citizen who is a visible minority, and an immigrant of several countries who is multilingual and well versed in various cultures. G. Eric Jarvis, MD, MSc, is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at McGill University and Director of the Cultural Consultation Service. He also directs the Culture and Early Psychosis Program at the Jewish General Hospital. His academic and research interests include the cultural adaptation of services for early psychosis, linguistic barriers in mental health care, and religion and mental health. He is also interested in academic editing and the history of psychiatry, and, in 2023, began as the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Transcultural Psychiatry.