Interview with Armando Baez, specialist in psychiatry.

Interview with Gintautas Narmontas, MD

Interview with Artiom Charkavliuk.

Globalization, with a growing number of migrant patients calls for better cross-cultural competence among health care workers. Hospitals and outpatient clinics have become multicultural and ethnic diversity among the staff is at present the norm. In Norway psychiatry is the medical discipline with the highest proportion of practicing International Medical Graduates (IMGs).

When Khmer Rouge’s terror regime in Cambodia was ended in 1979 there were no mental health psychiatrists in the country, and no mental health services. The Norwegian Council for Mental Health initiated an educational program for psychiatrists in Cambodia, which was managed by the University of Oslo in collaboration with the International Organization for Migration and the Cambodian Ministry of Health. Norwegian psychiatrists participated for six years in the training of the d

Interview with Professor Berit Berg by Anne Kristine Bergem.

Interview with dr. Jón Guðnason, Professor of Engineering at Reykjavik University, specializing in speech signal processing and language technology.

In 2016, Nobel Prize-winning physicist John J. Hopfield from Princeton University stated that radiologists would soon become obsolete due to advancements in artificial intelligence (AI). “I was personally offended,” says Helga Brøgger, a specialist in radiology. “I thought, ‘That’s not happening without a fight,’ and I decided to learn about technology from a medical perspective.”

For psychiatrists, working with autistic individuals presents considerable clinical and ethical challenges - especially when mental illness and somatic conditions intertwine. Many of us have encountered patients whose symptoms defy traditional categorization. The phrase “lost in translation” resonates deeply in such cases - not only across languages, but between body and mind, behavior and intention, professional and patient. This essay explores the consequences of missed sig

Mental health professionals can remedy the devastating communication patterns that tend to arise in the development and the aftermath of severe mental illness, by involving the family in the treatment and supporting them in their role as informal caregivers. In this essay I shed light on why and how the physician’s role as “interpreter between the patients and the relatives” can contribute decisively to improving communication and interaction among the family members.

Communicating research effectively to the general population requires simplifying complex ideas without oversimplifying the meaning. In psychiatry, probably the most complex field in medicine, this is a challenge. Another aspect that might make communicating research in psychiatry problematic is that everyone has their own opinion on diagnosis and treatment and that the psychiatrist themselves are not always agreeing on how to understand and apply research findings. Below I w

As psychiatrists, our words matter – they are our scalpel. As they have more potential to create harm than even the sharpest blade, we must use them wisely, and precisely. In this text, the definition of mental health is debated in classical Greek fashion to sharpen the blade. When Diogenes the Cynic enters the debate, chaos emerges – and an important lesson is learned.

The theme of this issue of the journal - lost in translation - automatically brings us back to the field of communication, of conversation. The topic of stigma is particularly sensitive and important in public communication on psychiatric topics. It is a stigma that comprehensively undermines mental health, the accessibility of mental health care to the end user, and the quality of life. It also affects our job satisfaction as mental health professionals, which means the qual

When things get lost in translation, there is a breakdown of communication. This is a major problem in healthcare, where it is literally vital that people can communicate their ailments clearly. I was the CEO of Landspítali, the national hospital of Iceland, for over 8 years and one of the hardest parts of my job was to learn about serious adverse events in our service, and reviewing  their causes. Even if we as a hospital prided ourselves on a safety culture, it was still a

The practice of utilizing children as language brokers in healthcare settings may offer immediate convenience for families and healthcare providers. However, it entails considerable risks and implications that can affect both the children's well-being and the accuracy of communication. This article explores some of the emotional, psychological, developmental, and ethical challenges associated with relying on children for language interpretation in mental health care settings.

What happens when psychological interventions travel across borders - between languages, cultures, and realities shaped by peace, trade, war, poverty, and displacement? While meaning can get lost in translation, something new can also be gained. This essay explores how mental health tools rooted in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can evolve through adaptation and become more relevant in radically different settings. Drawing from fieldwork in Norway, Lebanon...

The psychiatric diagnostic process is very different from diagnosis in other areas in medicine – it is a lot more difficult, since we have no biomarkers of any kind, only our translation into diagnostic categories of what we see and hear when we meet the patient. We are trying to find ways to validate our assessments with questionnaires and standardized interviews, but the difficulties remain. To make a psychiatric diagnosis is a question of very competent and empathic transl

Interview with Svandís Svavarsdóttir, Icelandic scholar and politician.

In March 2025 I flew to Nuuk - the capital of Greenland - to work as a consultant for 3 weeks. President Trump had once again, in the State of Union speech, threatened to take over Greenland. The atmosphere amongst Greenlanders (Inuit) was tense in the quiet and gentle way that is so typical for the mindset of the population. But they are worried with good reason about the unpredictability of world affairs and the sudden focus of interest.

Interview with Professor Eugenijus Laurinaitis.

Autistic people are often said to lack social skills and have deficits in pragmatic language, leading them to misunderstand non-autistic people. Recent research points to a more complicated picture: the double empathy problem. The double empathy problem is a concept that people of different neurotypes struggle to empathise with each other. It suggests that it's not just autistic people who struggle to understand non-autistic people but also the other way around (Milton, Gurbu

Specialist competence should be grounded in a knowledge of the principles and foundations, along with a basic understanding of the historical development of the field, and not only detailed memorization of guidelines and diagnostic manuals. In the field of psychiatry, a lack of understanding of history and the progress that has been made means that one may not appreciate how far we have come. Although the history of modern psychiatry is not very long, it is rife with examples

The scene is etched in my mind. A medical doctor standing in his spotless, off-white coat in a room one immediately conjectures must be in a typical hospital. He has a slight smile on his face, looking thoughtful and straight in the camera like a character in countless hospital dramas. When one takes the eyes of the doctor and looks at the surroundings one immediately realises that this is not an ordinary hospital. This is a small clinic in a remote African village. The ceili