Tag: cross cultural psychiatry

Anthropologist Zhiying Ma explores mental health care in China, including tensions between Western psychiatry and socially-oriented local frameworks.

Researchers find that efforts to integrate the Cambodian idiom baksbat (broken courage) into local mental health care may have served to pathologize adaptive responding.

Individuals who identify as religious may be more likely to have symptoms associated with psychosis.

Researchers find few existing "psychopathology scales" are appropriate for global utilization.

For The Atlantic, Julie Beck explores syndromes and “diseases” that are unique to particular cultures. She interviews Frank Bures, author of new book "The Geography of...

In The Atlantic, Julie Beck interviews emotional intelligence expert David Caruso about the importance of accurately recognizing and communicating your emotions. “American culture demands that the answer to the question ‘How are you?’ is not just ‘Good,’ but sometimes ‘Great.’ Or—this drives folks around the world crazy, who might be based in another country but they work for an American company—we need to be ‘Awesome.’ There's this relentless drive to mask the expression of our true underlying feelings. It's almost inappropriate.”

Will Storr, for Mosaic Science, wades into the world of neuroplasticity and explores to what extent our brains are capable of changing through adulthood. He asks if the tendency to overemphasize the findings of epigenetics and neuroplasticity isn’t tied to our cultural belief that individuals are totally free to create themselves and pursue the American dream.

Researchers recently completed a first of its kind, large-scale international survey of attitudes about mental health and they were surprised by the results. According to their analysis published in this month’s issue of the Journal of Affective Disorders, people in developed countries, like the United States, are more likely to assume that ‘mental illnesses’ are similar to physical illnesses and biological or genetic in origin, but they are also much less likely to think that individuals can overcome these challenges and recover