We developed an educational program on cultural competence for psychiatric professionals. Regarding social justice education that critically questions dominant ideologies, we held weekly 30-minute discussion groups with multidisciplinary professionals. Rather than focusing on a particular culture group, we aimed to realize through critical self-reflection, as advocated by Kumagai and Lypson, that “there is a part of the other that I cannot know,” and named this group the “Discussion Group on Otherness.” Using essays on medical culture written by researchers in the medical humanities as our main teaching material, we discussed what is (or should be) the relevant problem. This article discusses the issues that have emerged so far, the responses to these issues, and future developments.

The first author set up a study group with other members in 2014, aiming to improve multidisciplinary collaboration through reflection and discussions on discomfort ( “Moyatto” in Japanese) while focusing on group members’ experiences at work. One-hour online sessions were conducted monthly with multidisciplinary professionals from several institutions. We reflected on interprofessional collaboration based on Moyatto. This paper describes the history of the study group’s inception and development, the learning process of each session, and the theory as a framework. It also reports on the practice and changes in our study group, concluding that interprofessional collaboration requires first-order reflection within a same-profession group and second-order reflection among diverse professionals.