Schizophrenia, Social Practices and Cultural Values: A Conceptual Introduction (original) (raw)

Culture and schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders

Psychiatric Clinics of North America 2001, 24: 449-464., 2001

Reaction patterns labelled psychopathologic are believed to be universal, indicating their biologic roots. All over the world there are people who express delusions or report hallucinations. Yet, the prevalence and nature of psychopathology also varies, sometimes greatly so, from one culture to another. Differences across cultures underline the impact of cultural processes on mental illness. Cross-cultural psychiatry aspires to investigate both these dimensions, worldwide equivalence and culturally determined variability. Psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia extract an enormous price in terms of personal, social, and economic costs, across the world. Research over the decades has been able to establish schizophrenia as a disease of the brain, with multiple clinical manifestations. These manifestations combine in various ways to create considerable diversity among those afflicted. Both its strong genetic-biologic component and its differing presentations, make it ideally suited for the study of interactions between cultural, psychosocial, and biologic influences. This article attempts to present a brief overview of cultural aspects of schizophrenia and acute psychoses. The major emphasis is on cultural facets of epidemiology, etiology, phenomenology, and the course and outcome of these disorders. The main, and somewhat inevitable focus, is on the distinction between Western (developed) and non- Western (developing) cultures. Although this may not always be the ideal comparison, most research findings on schizophrenia, seemed to have relied on this distinction. Therefore, it is a useful starting point in the process of understanding the cross-cultural complexities of these disorders.

The Cultural Constructs of Schizophrenia

Culturally based social stigma against mental illness creates a discourse which allows for abuse, distrust, increased incarcerations, ​ anxiety, frustration, paranoia, and delusional thinking. While these all appear to be classic symptoms of mental illness they are also the side effects of living in a culture that is taught to fear you. I argue that the influence of culturally based stigma directly impacts the illness experience as well as the ability for recovery.

A Cross- Cultural History of Schizophrenia

2014

There is accumulating epidemiological evidence of cross-ethnic differences in relation to schizophrenia’s incidence and prevalence. However, there is a dearth of information about the manifestations of cultural differences in schizophrenia’s symptoms. This thesis aims to bridge the gap in our knowledge about the relationship between cross-cultural differences and schizophrenia. Throughout this thesis, I explore the similarities and dissimilarities of the content of clinical manifestation across cultures. I also examine and further develop epidemiological and clinical issues utilizing the ecological theory model. First, I perform a qualitative systematic review which includes 26 publications. I then discuss findings from a statistical analysis of a mental health population of 860 patients in Brent, North London. Lastly, I report results from a semistructured mental health questionnaire that was devised and disseminated to 48 mental health professionals in London. Results indicate tha...

Decoding Schizophrenia across Cultures: Clinical, Epidemiological and Aetiological Issues

There is accumulating epidemiological evidence of cross-ethnic differences in relation to schizophrenia’s incidence and prevalence. However, there is a dearth of information about the manifestations of cultural differences of schizophrenia’s symptoms. This thesis aims to bridge the gap in the knowledge on the relationship between cross-cultural differences and schizophrenia. Throughout this thesis, I explore the similarities and dissimilarities of the content of clinical manifestation across cultures. I also examine and further develop epidemiological and clinical issues. First, I perform a qualitative systematic review which includes 26 publications. This is followed by findings from a statistical analysis of a mental health population of 860 patients in Brent, North London. Lastly, I report on results from a semi-structured mental health questionnaire that was devised and disseminated to 48 mental health professionals in London. Results indicate that for ethnic groups that experie...

Schizophrenia: A Phenomenological-Anthropological Approach

Reconceiving Schizophrenia. Edited by Man Cheung Chung, K. W. M. (Bill) Fulford, and George Graham, 2007

We shall approach schizophrenia from the point of view of phenomenological anthropological psychiatry. We shall first provide a brief introduction to the phenomenological-anthropological point of view. This introduction will provide the context for explicating the basic phenomenological concepts that we will borrow from Edmund Husserl (1973, 1983) and apply to schizophrenia, namely, intentionality, synthesis, and constitution. We shall then address schizophrenic experience as a whole, insisting that the transformation of human experience that it involves affects even the most basic ontological constituents of the world, namely, space, time, causality, and the nature of objects. It will be necessary at that juncture to distinguish between an early stage of schizophrenia and a later one. We shall then be prepared to focus on the peculiar nature of schizophrenic hallucinations, first through an anthropological description of them and subsequently through a phenomenological one. We conclude by briefly addressing one final puzzle: if schizophrenic hallucinations exhibit the characteristics we attribute to them, why do the people who encounter them experience them with such certainty?

The Sublime Object of Psychiatry: Schizophrenia in Clinical and Cultural Theory

Schizophrenia has been one of psychiatry's most contested diagnostic categories. It has also served as a metaphor for cultural theorists to interpret modern and postmodern understandings of the self. These radical, compelling, and puzzling appropriations of clinical accounts of schizophrenia have been dismissed by many as illegitimate, insensitive and inappropriate. Until now, no attempt has been made to analyse them systematically, nor has their significance for our broader understanding of this most 'ununderstandable' of experiences been addressed. The Sublime Object of Psychiatry analyses representations of schizophrenia across a wide range of disciplines and discourses: biological and phenomenological psychiatry, psychoanalysis, critical psychology, antipsychiatry, and postmodern philosophy. Part one looks at the foundational clinical accounts of schizophrenia, concentrating on the work of Emil Kraepelin, Eugen Bleuler, Karl Jaspers, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Part two examines how these accounts were critiqued, adapted, and mobilised in the 'cultural theory' of R D Laing, Thomas Szasz, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Louis Sass, Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard. Using the aesthetic concept of the sublime as an organising framework, the book seeks to explain how a clinical diagnostic category came to be transformed into a potent metaphor in cultural theory, and how, in that transformation, schizophrenia came to be associated with the everyday experience of modern and postmodern life. Susan Sontag once wrote: 'Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance'. The Sublime Object of Psychiatry does not provide an answer to the question 'What is schizophrenia?', but instead brings clinical and cultural theory into dialogue in order to explain how schizophrenia became 'awash in significance'.

The 1990 Stirling Award Essay: Anthropology, Expressed Emotion, and Schizophrenia

The question ofhow social response 1 to schizophrenic illness 2 varies across cultures has long been of interest to anthropologists (Carin ). A principal issue is whether social responses are mediated primarily by culture or by the severity of individual psychopathology. In support of the latter position, Murphy (1982:70) has argued that there seems to be little that is distinctively cultural in the attitudes and actions directed toward the mentally ill .... There is apparently a common range of possible responses to the mentally ill person, and the portion of the range brought to bear regarding a particular person is determined more by the nature of his or her behavior than by a preexisting cultural set to respond in a uniform way to whatever is labelled mental illness.

Schizophrenia, Culture, and Culture-Bound Syndromes

Psychology Research and Applications, 2021

Schizophrenia is a severe mental illness that affects people all around the world. It presents in many different contexts, across geographic boundaries, and in different ways. Rates of schizophrenia seem generally to be the same regardless of geographical location, though there is some evidence that those in developed nations have a higher incidence of the disorder. Also, immigrants who relocate to areas where their culture has little, or no representation are at more risk for schizophrenia. While the prevalence of schizophrenia is similar around the world, the presentation of the disorder can vary widely, depending on the cultural, religious, and supernatural beliefs native to specific areas. Examples of varying types of presentation of schizophrenia, including culture-bound disorder variants, can give insight into the ways in which people from across the world make sense of this devastating disease, and ways in which they attempt to treat it.