Cultural Psychiatry: Theoretical, Clinical, and Research Issues

Abstract

As a discipline, cultural psychiatry has matured considerably in recent years and the ongoing quality of its theoretical, clinical, and research development holds great promise. The contemporary emphasis on culture as process permits a deeper analysis of the complexities of sociosomatics--the translation of meanings and social relations into bodily experience--and, thus, of the social course of illness. We also are learning a great deal more about cultural processes that affect therapy, including ethnopharmacologic and culturally valid family interventions that are directly relevant to patient care and mental health policy. And an important set of studies is examining the trauma experienced by refugees and immigrants. But at the same time many disquieting findings still point to the limited impact of cultural psychiatry on knowledge creation and clinical application in psychiatry. The failure of the cultural validation of DSM-IV is only the most dismaying. The persistent misdiagnosis of minority patients and the continued presence of racial bias in some treatment recommendations are also disheartening, as is the seeming contempt of many mainstream psychiatrists for culturally defined syndromes and folk healing systems. Widespread inattention to ethnic issues in medical ethics is another source of dismay. It is for these reasons that the culture of psychiatry itself becomes as important as the culture of patients as a topic for research and intervention. Most of the world still suffers from a terrible lack of basic mental health services, including life-saving medications and hospital beds. In the face of these limitations, and because of the increasing multicultural and pluralistic reality of contemporary life, the growing interpretive bridges linking indigenous systems of illness classification and healing to Western nosologies and therapeutic modalities become even more essential and the reluctance of mainstream clinicians to explore folk healing methods more incomprehensible. Psychiatry needs new ways of delivering culturally appropriate care to the disenfranchised and the destitute, for whom mainstream approaches are often too expensive, foreign, and centralized. As a profession, we also have much to learn from indigenous diagnosticians and therapists. Finally, psychosomatic, mind-brain, behavioral health, and psychopathologic investigations need to configure the social world in their paradigms of research if we are to understand better the sources and consequences of mental illness. Psychiatry can no more afford to be contextless than it can afford to be mindless or brainless.