Title: Culture and Mental Health (CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY) iResearchNet
Headings: Culture and Mental Health
Culture and Mental Health
The Growing Popularity of Culture and Mental Health
Critical Concepts and Issues
Ethnocentrism
Cultural Construction of Reality
Key Questions in the Study of Culture and Psychopathology
Some Critical Issues and Research Findings
Biology and Culture in Psychopathology
Concepts of Illness and Disease
Equivalence in Clinical Assessment
Epidemiology
Research Strategies for Studying Culture and Symptomatology Relationships
Ethnocultural Parameters of Psychopathology
Depressive Disorders
Schizophrenia
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Cultures as Causative of Psychiatric Disorders
1. Stress.
2. Normality and Abnormality.
3. Coping and Resources.
References:

Content: This fact has been well known for many years but has only recently become a major concern for both Western and non-Western people. For example, a quarter century ago, Clifford Geertz, an American cultural anthropologist, wrote (The Interpretation of Culture, New York, 1973): The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action, organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively – both against other such wholes and against social and natural background-is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures. ( P. 34)
More recently, Ajita Chakraborty (Lancet, 19, 337), an Indian psychiatrist, wrote: Even where studies were sensitive, and the aim was to show relative differences caused by culture, the ideas and tools were still derived from a circumscribed area of European thought. . . . Research is constrained by this view of psychiatry. . . . Psychiatrists in the developing world . . . have accepted a diagnostic framework developed by western medicine, but which does not seem to take into account the diversity of behavioral patterns they encounter. ( p. 1204)
Cultural Construction of Reality
But, most important, Western psychiatrists and mental health scientists and professionals are beginning to accept the view that culture constitutes the context in which our different worldviews are shaped and differentiated (i.e., the cultural construction of reality). Marsella noted (1982) that since our realities are culturally constructed, how can we expect universality in psychopathology?