Health and Illness: Mental Representations in Different Cultures

Abstract

Mental representations of health and illness are the cognitive structures that guide people's responses to symptoms and illness as well as various health threats. These mental representations can be viewed variously as structured vocabularies, social representations, or cognitive schemata. A striking feature of these representations is their marked variation between cultures. Cultures differ in conceptions of the basic nature of health and illness, in their disease vocabularies, and the underlying structure of their representation of health and illness. The mental representations found within a culture have a number of implications. First, disease concepts can be expected to strongly influence the interpretation of symptoms and bodily experience. Second, mental representations of health and illness provide a definition of when bodily distress represents illness, when assistance should be sought, and the type of help one should seek. Third, mental representations play an important role in determining whether a person stays in treatment once help is sought and, finally, these representations play an important role in how people respond to potential health threats. As such cultural differences in the mental representation of health and illness help us to understand variations between cultures in behavioral responses to symptoms and illness.