Staff

The Multicultural Mental Health Resource Centre is a multidisciplinary team of professionals from different ethnocultural backgrounds from across Canada. Research Team members are responsible for the implementation, follow-up and daily activities related to the project.

Laurence J. Kirmayer, MD, FRCPC, Project Leader, is James McGill Professor and Director, Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University. He is Editor-in-Chief of Transcultural Psychiatry, a quarterly scientific journal published by Sage (UK) and directs the Culture & Mental Health Research Unit of the Department of Psychiatry, Jewish General Hospital in Montreal where he conducts research on mental health services for immigrants and refugees, psychiatry in primary care, the mental health of Indigenous peoples, and the anthropology of psychiatry. He founded and directs the annual Summer Program and Advanced Study Institute in Cultural Psychiatry at McGill and directs the Network for Aboriginal Mental Health Research. His past research includes funded studies on the development and evaluation of a cultural consultation service in mental health, pathways and barriers to mental health care for immigrants, somatization in primary care, cultural concepts of mental health and illness in Inuit communities, risk and protective factors for suicide among Inuit youth in Nunavik (Northern Quebec), and resilience among Indigenous peoples. He co-edited the volumes, Current Concepts of Somatization (American Psychiatric Press), Understanding Trauma: Integrating Biological, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives (Cambridge University Press), Healing Traditions: The Mental Health of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada (University of British Columbia Press) and Encountering the Other: The Practice of Cultural Consultation (Springer SBM).

Sonia Cancian, MA, PhD, is the Project Coordinator of the MMHRC. She is a social and cultural historian interested in international migration and refugee studies. Before her return to Montreal in 2019, she served as Assistant Professor at Zayed University in Dubai and as Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. In addition to authoring a number of articles and chapters in edited collections and academic journals, she is the author of Families, Lovers, and their Letters: Italian Postwar Migration to Canada (University of Manitoba Press), and author/editor of With Your Words in My Hands: The Letters of Antonietta Petris and Loris Palma (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021). She is also the co-editor of the volumes, Migrant Letters: Emotional Language, Mobile Identities, and Writing Practices in Historical Perspective (Routledge, 2018), and more recently, Emotional Landscapes: Love, Gender, and Migration (with Marcelo Borges and Linda Reeder) published in early 2021 by University of Illinois Press. Her research projects focus on 20th and 21st century international migration, migrant correspondence, narratives of migration, gender dynamics, emotions history and transnational family dynamics, and more recently, post-conflict resettlement, memory and migration in Europe in the 20th and 21st centuries. She is an international member of The McGill Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Montreal (CIRM) and Visiting Researcher of The Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, McGill University.

Antonella Clerici, BA, is Coordinator for the Cultural Consultation Service (CCS), a service that provides links to community resources. It offers formal cultural psychiatric assessments and recommendations for treatment under the direction of Dr. G. Eric Jarvis, Department of Psychiatry, Jewish General Hospital. She is also the website manager and editor for the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University and the Culture and Mental Health Research Unit, Jewish General Hospital. She completed her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology at Concordia University.

Katherine McLean-Lynch, BA, is a research assistant at the MMHRC. She graduated from Concordia University with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology. Her two main research interests revolve around investigating the social and cultural aspects of an individual’s lived experience of mental illness through the adoption of enactivist and dialogical approaches as well as facilitating access to quality mental health care for underserved populations.

Jeremy Chapman is a freelance web developer and webmaster specializing in WordPress and ecommerce. He serves as a consultant and technical support for the MMHRC website. He can be reached at https://jerchapman.com.

Claude Taillefer, PhD (philosophy, mathematics and postdoctoral studies in biostatistics and epidemiology), is a translator for the MMHRC. A former medical translator for the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, he is currently an independent medical translator for several research groups affiliated with the Montreal Jewish General Hospital, the CHUM Research Centre, McGill University and the Université de Montréal. Claude is also a mathematician/epidemiologist consultant for the Public Health Agency of Canada, the WHO and the CDC. He specializes in the mathematical assessment of pandemic preparedness plans and the epidemiology of systemic autoimmune rheumatic diseases (SARD). Lastly, Claude is a lecturer in mathematics and statistics at the college level.