blingbling said:

The development of a pan-human nosological framework for interpreting psychiatric disorders is fraught with complications, particularly when the sanctioned medical illnesses of a dominant culture fails to describe the maladies of less dominant or marginalized cultures. This effect is nowhere more obvious than in western psychiatry’s inability to properly deal with culturally-bound syndromes such as Amok, Koro, Latah and Taijin Kyofusho. The classification of clinical conditions within western psychiatry is largely dependent on symptom analysis. Discreet mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar and depression are interpreted via symptom clusters that constitute a given mental disorder which leads to diagnosis and treatment.

This smooth, linear progression from symptom analysis to treatment falls to pieces in the face of highly variable cultural understandings of illness which may not fit with pre-existing western ideas of sickness and health. Psychiatric disorders are not static entities devoid of social influence. They are dependent on the time and space within which the disease arises. What is constituted as a psychiatric disorder is negotiated through social and cultural networks of meaning. The reduction of psychiatric disorders to purely biological mechanisms that give rise to discreet psychological maladaptations is itself a product of cultural influence and networks of meaning spanning multiple social spheres.

Discuss

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Evil Clown said:

I think that cultural influences make psychiatric disorders manifest in different ways. Disorders such as phobias, ocd, depression, etc. are all common to human beings but manifest differently depending on stuff.

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