[MUSIC] We're all born into a culture, every person around the world. Nobody is born with a culture. So one of the major challenges for all of us is to understand the role culture plays in our lives, how we experience distress, how we express distress, where we seek help from and the role medicine can play in understanding individual's cultural experiences. [MUSIC] Culture is a set of beliefs, it's a pattern of behaviour that we learn as we are growing up. Each culture has its own way of bringing children up, that affects the way we think, our social development, our relationships with others, and the way we see the world. Culture helps us formulate our inner world to try and understand why I'm thinking like that. Culture also has a set of influences, which include arts, morals, beliefs, and our patterns of behaviour. Culture leads to a number of shared and transmitted values, which are transgenerational, but not in a genetic sense, of course, there are genetic influences by culture, but it is the social aspects of culture which play a much bigger role in formulating the way we think, the way we behave, the way we interact with each other. Broadly, culture means a common heritage, a set of beliefs, a set of norms, a set of values which make us who we are. [MUSIC] Built within the culture are our micro identities, which are related to our religion, sexual orientation, gender, age, socioeconomic status, educational status and each of these micro identities determine how we respond to distress, how we respond to others. [MUSIC] and one of the major challenges is that, quite often, we tend to forget that clinicians have their own culture and patients have their own culture. Embedded within that culture is the whole idea of micro identities and these micro identities can influence our interactions with others at a number of levels. [MUSIC] For example, people may choose not to talk about their sexual orientation because it's either illegal in that setting or they do not see it of any relevance. They may not wish to talk about their religion, but the clinician needs to be aware of how these factors are playing a role in expression of distress, in formulating what's going on and it's also worth bearing in mind that doctors and clinicians have their own cultures, which may be related to their speciality, it may be related to where they trained, it may be related to the institution within which they are working. [MUSIC] and we also need to remember that cultures are not static, they're dynamic, they change, they keep changing due to a number of factors. We change in response to changes in the culture, and cultures, in turn, change us. So when we are assessing a patient, one of the major factors that we need to bear in mind is that the culture they were born in, whether it was 5 years ago, 10 years ago, thirty years ago, may not necessarily be the same as is now and culture is integrated into everything we do, everything we experience, it's not something separate, it is what it makes us.
