Cultural psychiatry
Cultural psychiatry studies how cultural meanings, practices, and social conditions shape mental distress, diagnosis, treatment, and recovery.
Explanatory model: A person’s account of what caused an illness, how it works, and what might help. Different accounts of distress shape whether people seek psychiatric care and how they respond to it.
Medical anthropology: The study of how culture, society, and power shape health, illness, and healing. It provides methods and concepts that cultural psychiatry applies to mental health.
Ethnopsychiatry: The comparative study of mental illness and healing across cultural settings. It is a historical and intellectual precursor to contemporary cultural psychiatry.
Transcultural psychiatry: The study and practice of psychiatry across cultural groups and settings. It overlaps with cultural psychiatry while emphasizing cross-cultural comparison and clinical work.
Cultural relativism: The approach of interpreting beliefs and practices within their cultural context rather than by external standards. It challenges universal psychiatric judgments but can complicate claims about shared suffering.
Cultural concept of distress: A pattern of suffering and expression shaped by a particular cultural context. These patterns show how distress can take locally meaningful forms beyond standard diagnostic categories.
Psychiatric diagnosis: The classification of mental disorders based on symptoms, criteria, and clinical judgment. Diagnosis can reflect cultural assumptions about normality, impairment, and illness.
Arthur Kleinman: An American psychiatrist and anthropologist who shaped medical anthropology and cultural psychiatry. His work on explanatory models and local illness experience strongly influenced the field.
Global mental health: The study and improvement of mental health worldwide, especially across unequal resource settings. It raises questions about translating psychiatric interventions across cultural contexts.
Psychiatric universalism: The view that mental disorders have core features that hold across cultures. Its claims of shared disorders must be weighed against cultural variation in experience and meaning.