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: Obviously, when a decision must be made regarding a person’s sanity and treatment, ethnocentrism can have destructive consequences. Most of our basic conceptual, methodological, and professional assumptions and practices regarding mental health are derived and validated within the historical and cultural contexts of northern European and North American societies. As such, they are ethnocentric and culturally biased. They are rooted within ideological worldviews that favor individualistic, materialistic, democratic, and scientific perspectives. As a result, the essential concepts of personhood, normality and abnormality, illness and health, consciousness, and personal choice and responsibility that guide Western psychological and psychiatric thought and practice bear little relevance and/or applicability to people from non- Western cultures and traditions. 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. . . .