An Interdisciplinary Approach to Mental Disorder among the Polar Eskimos of Northwest Greenland

Abstract

Mental health, in both industrialized and underdeveloped societies, is coming to be recognized as one of the world's leading social problems. In order to bring more varied skills to bear on this challenging issue, scientific institutions are encouraging re search in several fields other than those traditionally cultivated by psychologists and psychiatrists, particularly in chemical, bio logical, and social sciences. Hope is expressed that such inter disciplinary efforts may result in a break-through in the under standing of the nature of mental disorder (see Wallace 1960 for anthropological review of the historical development of research). Unfortunately, however, many of the research pro jects in those new areas have been conducted in effect by single disciplines with little or no integration with their sister sciences, even where the representatives of the several disciplines sit to gether at a seminar table. Interdisciplinary investigations in the mental health area are faced with the problem of multiple causal and contributing factors. Although single factors have often been isolated and studied separately with the hope that these were causally sufficient variables, such uni-disciplinary studies have not been notably successful in dealing with mental illness.