Vincenzo Di Nicola is an Italian-Canadian psychologist, psychiatrist and family therapist, and philosopher of mind. 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.
Education 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.
Work Di Nicola's career has shown several foci, examining children, families and culture in various combinations. 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 was President-Elect (2019–22) and is now President (2022–25). Di Nicola is the author of several books, including A Stranger in the Family: Culture, Families, and Therapy, integrating family therapy and cultural psychiatry to create cultural family therapy, and Letters to a Young Therapist: Relational Practices for the Coming Community, an overview of principles of relational psychology and therapy, and co-author, with Drozdstoj Stoyanov, of Psychiatry in Crisis: At the Crossroads of Social Sciences, the Humanities, and Neuroscience, an investigation into the history, theoretical bases and current practices of psychiatry in order to situate, understand and resolve its epistemological and ontological crises.
Cultural family therapy
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.
Social and cultural psychiatry Another example of integration was the merging of child psychiatry and transcultural research to create the new area of transcultural child psychiatry. He was the plenary speaker at a conference on transcultural difficulties in child psychiatry, which was held at McGill University, a pioneering research center in transcultural psychiatry, and the proceedings were published (Sayegh et al., 1992). Di Nicola's work on eating disorders called for a new historical and cultural view of what he called "anorexia multiforme," a form of suffering that is a cultural chameleon, expressing itself differently in different times, cultures and places. A major area of Di Nicola's academic activity is in Social psychiatry, focused on the social determinants of health and mental health, his manifesto for social psychiatry, outlining the history, current state and future prospects of Social psychiatry, and his essay on the sociopolitical notion of the Global South as a bridge between globalization and the global mental health (GMH) movement that offers an emergent apparatus or conceptual tool for social psychiatry.
Interface between philosophy and psychiatry Di Nicola's work also focuses on the interface between philosophy and psychiatry, addressing philosophical issues, ranging from the rights of children, to employing Giorgio Agamben's "state of exception" in definitions of human being and in trauma studies and Alain Badiou's "event" in his work on Trauma and Event, announcing a Psychiatry of the Event and a manifesto for Slow Thought in the spirit of the Slow Movement, to an ontological analysis of the crisis in psychiatry:
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