Cultures of the Internet: Identity, community and mental health

The Internet and World Wide Web have woven together humanity in new ways, creating global communities, new forms of identity and pathology, and new modes of intervention. This issue of Transcultural Psychiatry presents selected papers from the annual McGill Advanced Study Institute (ASI) in Cultural Psychiatry on ‘‘Cultures of the Internet’’ which took place in Montreal, April 26–29, 2011. The ASI addressed four broad areas: (a) how the Internet is transforming human functioning, personhood, and identity through the engagement with electronic media; (b) how electronic networking gives rise to new groups and forms of community, with shifting notions of public and private, local and distant; (c) the emergence of new pathologies of the Internet, e.g., Internet addiction, group suicide, cyberbullying, and disruptions of neurodevelopment; and finally, (d) the use of the Internet in mental health care, for example, by consumer advocacy and support groups, aswell as for the delivery of health information, web-based consultation, treatment intervention, and mental health promotion. In addition to some of the ASI papers, this issue includes other recent contributions to the journal on related themes. In this introductory essay, we set out some of the broad implications of the Internet and related new media and information communication technologies (ICT) for cultural psychiatry.