Culture and mental health Flashcards
Universalist perspective of mental health
Many disorders have identical symptoms
cultural relativism of mental health
View that culture and psychopathy are intertwined
Abnormality in mental health
Disorders can be understood only in the cultural framework within they occur
- cautions against ethnocentrism
Classification systems for mental disorders
- DSM
- ICD
- CCMD
DSM
Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders
–> DSM V revised to include cultural concepts of distress (CCD) and cutural fromulation
ICD
International classification of diseases
CCMD
Chinese classification of mental disorders
Three aspects of cultural understanding of mental health
- cultural syndromes of distress
- cultural idioms of distress
- cultural explanation of distress
Cultural syndromes of distress
Patterns of symptoms that tend to cluster together for individuals in specific cultural grooups, communities, or contexts
Cultural idioms of distress
Ways that communities and cultural groups communicate and express their distressing thoughts, behaviors and emotions
Cultural explanations of distress
What communities and cultural groups believe is the cause of the distress, symptoms, or illness
Cross-cultural assessment tools for mental health
- questionnaires, interview protocols, or standardized tasks requiring behavioral response
- play limited role in other cultures with varying definitions of abnormality
- large scale comparatie studies often need local (emic) supplements
- cultural backgrounds of both therapist and client
–> perception + assessment
Somatization
- mental health
- more prototypically collectivist cultures more somatization (physical symptoms/complaints)
- more prototypically individualist cultures more psychologization (emotional symptoms/complants)
Karabasan
The way that people describe having a sleeping disorder in Turkey, sounds a lot like hallucinations. It is not, they describe like some ghost is sitting on top of them, but apparently, this is normalin Turkey when you talk about having a sleeping disorder
Overpathologizing
Considering behavior as pathological, when behavior is a normal variation for that individual’s culture