Vincenzo Di Nicola

Di Nicola is a collaborating partner of the Collaborating Centre for Values-based Practice in Health and Social Care at St. Catherine's College, Oxford University where he participated in the Advanced Studies Seminar dedicated to his work on cultural aspects of eating disorders. In 2019, he founded and was elected President of the Canadian Association of Social Psychiatry (CASP) and was made an Honorary Fellow of the World Association of Social Psychiatry (WASP), of which he is President-Elect.

Di Nicola is a tenured Full Professor in the Dept. of Psychiatry & Addiction Medicine at the University of Montreal, where he founded and directs the postgraduate course on Psychiatry and the Humanities, and Clinical Professor in the Dept. of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at The George Washington University, where he gave The 4th Annual Stokes Endowment Lecture in 2013. He has taught in the Global Mental Health Faculty of the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma affiliated with Harvard Medical School. In 2001, Di Nicola was made Professor, Honoris Causa, of Faculdades Integradas do Oeste de Minas (FADOM) in Minas Gerais, Brazil. Di Nicola was bestowed the Honorary Chair (Hon LD - Licentia Docendi) of Social Psychiatry and conferred the academic title of Honorary Professor (Hon MA Sc - Magister Scientiae ad Honorem) at the Milan School of Medicine of the Università Ambrosiana in 2021 for his contributions to the field of social psychiatry.

Di Nicola was the recipient of the Camille Laurin Prize from the Fédération des médecins spécialistes du Québec. He was made a Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in 2011 and Distinguished Fellow of the APA in 2017; in 2022, he was given the Distinguished Service Award of the APA and made a Distinguished Life Fellow for a combination of distinguished achievements and life service to the APA. Di Nicola's work as a child psychiatrist was recognized by the two North American academies in his field: in 2018, the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) awarded Di Nicola the AACAP Jeanne Spurlock, MD, Lecture and Award on Diversity and Culture for which he gave the lecture, “Borders and Belonging, Culture and Community: From Adversity to Diversity in Transcultural Child and Family Psychiatry;" and the Canadian Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (CACAP) awarded him the 2021 Naomi Rae Grant Award for "creative, innovative, seminal work on ... community intervention, consultation, or prevention." Furthermore, Di Nicola was made a Fellow of the Canadian Psychiatric Association (FCPA) in 2020, Distinguished Fellow (DFCPA) in 2022, and elected by his peers as a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences (CAHS) in 2021, the highest honour granted to health sciences scholars in Canada.

His approach to working with families across cultures brought together a new synthesis of family therapy and transcultural psychiatry. Critical reviews were positive and encouraging by leaders in family therapy, such as Mara Selvini Palazzoli and Celia Jaes Falicov, as well as those in transcultural psychiatry, such as Armando Favazza. When his work was collected into his model of cultural family therapy in A Stranger in the Family in 1997, it was received as an important contribution to working with immigrant families. A Brazilian edition in Portuguese translation appeared in 1998. Di Nicola continued to elaborate his model of cultural family therapy in articles, chapters, a follow-up volume, Letters to a Young Therapist: Relational Practices for the Coming Community, as well as invitations to present the 4th Annual Stokes Endowment Lecture in family studies at The George Washington University and a thirty-year perspective on his model presented at McGill University where he first developed it and the Accademia di Psicoterapia della Famiglia in Rome, Italy where Di Nicola's model is taught. Di Nicola co-founded and co-chairs Family & Culture special interest groups with the Society for the Study of Psychiatry & Culture (SSPC) and the World Association of Cultural Psychiatry (WACP) which awarded him the 2022 WACP Creative Education Award in Cultural Psychiatry.

Another integration was in bringing together child psychiatry with transcultural research to call for the new field of transcultural child psychiatry. He was the plenary speaker at a conference on transcultural issues in child psychiatry, at McGill University a pioneering research center in transcultural psychiatry, the proceedings of which were published (Sayegh, et al., 1992).

Di Nicola trained in psychology, medicine and psychiatry, and in philosophy: with a BA (First Class Honours) in Psychology from McGill University (1976), MPhil in Clinical Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, University of London (1978), MD from McMaster University (1981), Diploma in Psychiatry from McGill University (1986), and later in his career, with a PhD (Summa Cum Laude) in Philosophy from the European Graduate School (2012). In recent interviews with his medical alma mater (McMaster) and the Université de Montréal where he teaches, Di Nicola traced the origins of his dual career in medicine and philosophy to his working class roots growing up in Hamilton, Ontario, where his mother was a housekeeper for McMaster University professors in two departments - psychiatry and philosophy.