The two groups of psychiatrists were also asked to outline barriers to access to care in their countries.

“In the US and in India, most of the barriers were similar. However, in the US, substance abuse was significantly different,” she said. “American psychiatrists found substance abuse to be a big barrier for care, while the Indian psychiatrists did not. The Indian psychiatrists found embarrassing the family as a very big barrier to access to mental health care that American psychiatrists didn’t.”

The DSM-5 has now incorporated the cultural formulation interview (CFI), with the aim of defining how to ask patients about cultural issues with regard to mental health. During the press conference, Dr Biswas was asked how these new data on the views of different groups of psychiatrists dovetail with that move to incorporate cultural issues among patients.

“I think that perhaps tools like this study will help us develop better ideas of how mental illness presents and how psychiatrists think about mental illness in a cultural context,” she told Medscape Medical News.

“The CFI asks, ‘What do you make of your symptoms? What do you call your schizophrenia?’ ― questions about what do you name your illness to be and how does family get involved,” Dr Biswas said. “I think when we understand the somatic issues ― for example, in the depression data with somatic issues, specific pain is something that we see much more commonly in India or recognize much more commonly in India. If someone says, ‘I call it my stomach gurgling,’ we might be able to use the information from the CFI and from this type of data to say, okay, now we can think about that as depression.

“If American psychiatrists are doing work abroad, these are ways they can think about using the Cultural Formulation Interview, as well as these data,” she added.

Asked to comment on the findings, Jeffrey Borenstein, MD, president and CEO of the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, in New York City, and chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Council on Communications, called this kind of data “critical when training doctors who will be working on global mental health issues.”

“The issue of global mental health and cultural competency is extremely important, and an area of our field that people are looking at more and training is occurring more for this,” Dr Borenstein said. “We need to treat the person, not just a bunch of symptoms; that’s very important.”

“Looking at these issues points out the significance of cultural sensitivity, whether it…be on an international basis or here in the United States, making sure that clinicians are sensitive to cultural issues amongst our population,” he told Medscape Medical News.

Although there were a lot of similarities in symptoms cited by psychiatrists, there were some differences, he added, “and some of those differences may have related more to the point in the illness that the patient might be presenting, so it may very well be that some of the differences that occurred really were a part of a larger question of treatment access to care.”

This could lead to further research in this area, he noted. “If it turns out that in a particular setting, people aren’t getting treatment until the illness is progressed to a further point, that says something about making some adjustments, because early intervention, we know, is the best clinically for patients.”

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American Psychiatric Association (APA) 2015 Annual Meeting. Abstract P2-2. Presented May 17, 2015.