Bouffée Délirante: A Case of a Young Haitian Man in Taiwan

Abstract

Background: Immigrants have great risk for psychiatric disorders under cultural impact. Increasing cross-cultural stress-related psychiatric problems can be expected due to increasing international communications contemporarily. Psychiatrists need to be familiar to the diverse manifestations of immigrants' psychopathology. Case Report: A Haitian male postgraduate student developed transient psychotic symptoms which were apparently related to cross-cultural stress and resembled those of bouffee delirante, which is a variant of acute and transient psychotic disorder and is regarded as a culture-bound syndrome in DSM-IV. Conclusion: We review literature and discuss immigrants’ paranoid reaction, culture-bound syndrome, historical concepts of bouffee delirante, and application of cultural formulation in clinical practice. We wish that these viewpoints can decrease the chance of having inaccurate diagnosis and giving suboptimal intervention caused by difficulties in interpreting the immigrants' psychopathology.