'What is normal today may not be normal in a year's time': Dr. Dinesh Bhugra on the idea of 'normal' in psychiatry

Dr. Dinesh Bhugra became interested in psychiatry while dissecting cadavers in medical school in Pune, India. From the inside, the bodies looked so similar, yet people think and behave so differently, he mused. He became fascinated with the forces that shape differences in behavior, eventually focusing on culture.

"Most of my active research has been on culture and mental illness," said Bhugra, who previously served as president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) and the British Medical Association.

Bhugra, who is also a professor emeritus of mental health and cultural diversity at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College London, has spent much of his career striving to improve public mental health. He's addressed gender-based interpersonal violence and worked to reach underserved populations, including refugees, asylum seekers, elderly populations, and the LGBTQ+ community. Bhugra, the first openly gay president of the WPA, has also been outspoken on how prejudice and discriminatory policies impact the mental health and suicide rates of LGBTQ+ people.

Live Science spoke with Bhugra ahead of the HowTheLightGetsIn festival in London, where he will discuss mental health, how we define "normal behavior" and whether those definitions are actually useful benchmarks in the context of psychiatric care. His talk will take place Sept. 22.

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Nicoletta Lanese: You emphasize that psychiatry deals with a complex mix of biological, cultural and socioeconomic components. Do you feel like that concept is well incorporated into modern psychiatry?

Dr. Dinesh Bhugra: I think there are still gaps. Quite often as clinicians, we do not have enough time to explore everything. I've seen it in places like India, where the consultation is so short. So, you know, a patient starts speaking, you kind of give them a prescription — but it [psychiatric care] is much more than that.

What I've found in clinical practice is that most patients can live with their symptoms as long as they have a job, they've got some money in their pocket, they've got a relationship, they've got a roof over their head. As clinicians, we are focusing on symptom eradication or symptom management. So there is a tension there, which is much worse in some countries where resources are not adequate. I know colleagues in India who may see between 50, 100 patients a day, so you're giving five-minute consultations. Whereas in the U.S.A. and U.K. you probably get a bit more time, but often not enough [to really get to know a patient].

Something else which has been intriguing me in the last few years has been the notion of identity. We all have multiple micro-identities, and those are kind of a mosaic. Depending upon who you're talking to, bits of the identity light up — whether it's gender, religion, sexual orientation, profession. And quite often in clinical settings, we see the identity as that of "the patient," not an individual.

And I think that needs to shift. … It's incredibly important to see the individual as an individual rather than as a set of symptoms.

NL: I know you do a lot of work related to training the next generations of psychiatrists. I'm wondering what you see as a good way of helping them develop that cultural understanding?

DB: Firstly, everybody has a culture. And one of the things in cultural competency is understanding your own culture, its strengths and its weaknesses. And then, you know, looking at the individual … through that lens, to understand "Why are they feeling like this? Why are they expressing their distress in this way? Am I really understanding that?"

You can't be an expert in every culture, but [what's crucial is that] you're aware that this individual is different [from others even within their own culture and geographical setting].

Equally importantly, if you don't know something, be prepared to acknowledge that. "No, I don't know this, but I know somebody who might be able to educate, inform, teach me," whether it's community leaders or an individual's family. The family will tell you whether this person is behaving as "normal" or "abnormal." And that's the crux: how cultures define what is deviant, what is normal, what's acceptable.

NL: On that note, could you give us a preview of what you might talk about at the HowTheLightGetsIn festival?

DB: It's about "What's normal?" And again, from a cultural perspective, what's normal in one culture is not normal in another. Particularly from a psychiatric point of view, we need to be sensitive to those variations and variables. And it's also worth considering that what is normal today may not be normal in a year's time; what was normal 50 years ago may not be acceptable, may be seen as deviant now.

One of the examples that quite often I give in terms of cultural variations: In the U.S.A. post-Stonewall riots, in 1973 homosexuality was taken out of the diagnostic and statistical manual. So overnight, millions of people were "cured"; they did not have a mental illness anymore. So how do we as clinicians and researchers and the interested public make sense of those kinds of things which are sometimes imposed upon us — that this is "deviant," this is not acceptable.

Cultures influence cognitive development. Cultures influence the way we see the world. So we may be seeing the same mosaic from different angles. And part of the challenge is, how do we bring those two differing views together? Any definition of "normal" changes.

Particularly for psychiatric disorders that's even more relevant because we have few objective tests. So making sense of individual experience then becomes absolutely vital in the context of the family, community, culture, society, national and international norms.

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NL: In gaining that cultural understanding, how can psychiatrists-in-training recognize their own learned biases?

DB: I always start off by saying that, "Everybody has at least one prejudice." So the challenge really is, how do you know what it is and what are you going to do about it? That's the starting point in that dialogue about being aware of one's own biases, whether they're conscious or unconscious, whether they are visible or not.

One of the other things that I've been writing about quite a lot recently is the notion of "other" — we create "others" because that gives us our identity. I am not like you; I am different, you are different. How do we accept that difference? How do we make sure that I'm aware, whether it's a gender bias or religion bias or age bias or socioeconomic bias or skin color?

In clinical settings that's absolutely critical because we can then get into ridiculous stereotyping, which gives us a shortcut but it's problematic. No two patients who have similar symptoms will respond or explain [their experience] in the same way.

NL: What role do you feel psychiatry plays in confronting norms that may be bigoted or harmful? I'm thinking of the criminalization of homosexuality, for example.

DB: Psychiatry as a discipline and psychiatrists as professionals have a major role to advocate for our patients. Quite often, patients are not in a position, or may not have the capacity or ability to advocate for themselves. And we are privileged, both in terms of our professional experience, context, learning, but also as members of society [in that psychiatrists hold status and influence]. So we've got a dual role in that advocacy to the policy makers, to funders for research, funders for services. … We are well-placed to be advocates.

But it's really important for us to learn from other cultures as to how they're doing things differently, perhaps with better results. Perhaps doing it in the context of working across barriers — working with religious leaders, working with community leaders, working with teachers, and so on and so forth. So how do we learn from each other?

NL: Do you have any final thoughts you'd like to close on?

DB: I'm going to leave with two key messages. One is that mental health is an integral part of health and it should not be seen as something out there, somebody else's problem. We all need to look after our mental health and well-being so that we can look after our physical health, and vice versa.

The second take-home message really is that health cannot be seen in a silo, or in isolation. Education, employment, housing, justice, health, they're all interlinked. And across all the age ranges from childhood to older adulthood, there are external factors which will impinge upon our health, including mental health. And we need to be aware both from a policy perspective, but also from [the perspective of improving] prevention of mental illnesses and distress and promoting well-being and mental health.

Live Science has partnered with HowTheLightGetsIn festival, which takes place from Sept. 21 to 22 at Kenwood House in London. See how you can get a special discount.