8 - Mental Health Systems in a Cross-Cultural Context

Summary

This chapter explores the relationship between culture and the experience of stress and describes a variety of culture-bound syndromes. Concepts of mental health, distinctions between mental health and mental illness, and distinctions between mental and physical illness are highly variable across cultures. Individual characteristics also interact with social roles in specific cultural contexts. Culture-bound syndromes may either form a distinctive class of disordered behaviors or ultimately turn out to be local variants of known psychiatric diagnoses. Reports on psychoeducational interventions for ethnically diverse families in the United States suggest possible adaptations. These might include involving extended family networks or community support persons, reducing the length of sessions, focusing on economic survival issues, eschewing egalitarian approaches and confirming the authority of group leaders, and other special cultural considerations. Cultural constructivists and symbolic interactionists remind us that all human behavior must be viewed in fluid interaction with ever moving cultural currents.