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Cross-cultural Psychiatry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Simon Dein
Simon Dein*
Affiliation:
Speedwell Mental Health Centre, Deptford, London SE8 4AT
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Extract

“Insanity is then a part of the price we pay for civilisation. The causes of the one increase with the developments and results of the other” (Jarvis, 1851).

Emil Kraepelin, while visiting southeast Asia at the turn of the century, noted the absence of depression among various Asian populations. He believed that mental disorders were organic diseases for which specific pathogens would ultimately be found. Despite the cultural variations in mental disorders he observed during his world trip in 1904, he considered mental disorder to be universal: “mental illness in Java showed broadly the same clinical picture as we see in our country … The overall similarity far outweighed the deviant features.”

Type
Reading About…
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 165 , Issue 4 , October 1994 , pp. 561 - 564
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1994 

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References

References

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Further reading

Journals Google Scholar
A number of journals have relevance to both psychiatry and anthropology. These include: Culture Medicine and Psychiatry; Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review; Social Science and Medicine; Medical Anthropology; International Journal of Social Psychiatry; British Journal of Medical Psychology; and Medical Anthropology Quarterly. The newly established British Medical Anthropology Review contains a number of articles in the field of cross-cultural psychiatry. Other journals of interest are Nouvelle Revue d'Ethnopsychiatrie and Curare: Psychopathologie Africaine. Google Scholar
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Littlewood, R. (1992) Psychiatric diagnosis and racial bias: empirical and interpretive approaches. Social Science and Medicine, 34, 141–149.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Littlewood, R. & Lipsedge, M. (1987) The butterfly and the serpent: culture, psychopathology and biomedicine. Culture Medicine and Psychiatry, 11, 289–335. (An examination of culture-bound syndromes as symbolic communication. “Western” psychiatric syndromes are conceptualised as ‘culture-bound’.) CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
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Cox, J. H. (1986) Transcultural Psychiatry. London: Croom Helm. A collection of papers from members of the Transcultural Psychiatry Society. Chapters focus on a wide range of issues from traditional psychiatry (when is a delusion not a delusion) through service provision to an examination of Chinese, African and Indian psychiatry.Google Scholar
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Helman, C. (1990) Culture Health and Illness. Bristol: Wright. An introduction to medical anthropology with a chapter on transcultural psychiatry.Google Scholar
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Kleinman, A. (1986) Social Origins of Distress and Disease: Depression, Neuresthenia and Pain in Modern China. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Kleinman, A. & Good, B. (1985) Culture and Depression: Studies in the Anthropology and Cross Cultural Psychiatry of Affective Disorder. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Showalter, E. (1987) The Female Malady: Women, Madness and the English Culture, 1830–1980. London: Virago. A critical overview of the relation between gender and psychiatry. The book examines how cultural ideas about ‘proper’ feminine behaviour have shaped the definition and treatment of female insanity for 150 years.Google Scholar
Simons, R. & Hughes, C. (1985) The Culture Bound Syndromes: Folk Illnesses of Psychiatric and Anthropological Interest. Dordrecht: Reidel.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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