ABSTRACT

Soon after I had moved to the UK 12 years ago as a young psychiatrist, a helpful senior professor took me aside and asked me with some concern whether I was experiencing ‘culture shock’. I was indeed in culture shock. I had moved from the bustling city of Mumbai (then Bombay), to Wolverhampton. Email was an unknown quantity in the NHS in those days and I had to travel to Birmingham to send an email back home. I had no family or friends in the UK but what assisted me in my transition as a migrant psychiatrist was my relationship with my patients which seemed remarkably similar 5000 miles away in a land with a vastly different socio-cultural milieu.