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At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1989

Experience of nervousness and anxiety disorders in Puerto Rican women: psychiatric and ethnopsychological perspectives.

Analyses of case materials describe variations in the experiences of Puerto Rican women diagnosed as having an anxiety disorder, in treatment with mental health clinicians, physicians, or traditional healers. Their common complaints are examined as core symbolic elements in culturally patterned complexes of meanings focused around personal trauma, stressful life events, personal and social reactions, expectations about treatment, and the course of illness. Many of these women report themselves to be "nervous," to be "sick from nerves," or to have had an "ataque de nervios." "Nervousness" is the base symbolic domain in Puerto Rico of what psychiatry labels "anxiety disorder," although it is also a common complaint of many disorders. What "nervousness" means to patients/clients and their clinicians or healers is examined within the frames of multilayered popular and biomedical interpretations. The special difficulties of women in Puerto Rico are highlighted, and psychiatric and ethnopsychological (Spiritist) models of etiology and treatment are compared.

Adult↗
PubMed1998

Ethnopsychologies: cultural variations in theories of mind.

A set of basic beliefs about others' minds and behavior, referred to as folk psychology or theory of mind, is often discussed as if it were the same the world over. Yet, certainly variation in folk psychology exists. This article compares several aspects of European American theory of mind with other cultural models, as suggested by experiments and ethnographies, with the purpose of illuminating the degree to which there is variation. After summarizing 4 types of variation, the author explores possible sources of variability, implications for the mindreading process, potential universals, and directions for future research.

Adult↗
PubMed1975

Saints, Jnun, and Dreams: An essay in Moroccan ethnopsychology.

It is with the effect of an idiom - a psychological idion - and its articulation on the subjective life of the individual that I will be concerned in this paper. My argument is necessarily hypothetical:-1 Human beings as members of a society are provided wiht an idiom by which they structure and evaluate their reality, their world, including themselves, and insofar as the experience of reality can be distinguished from the reality itself their experience of reality, of their world, of themselves. Although this idiom is necessarily expressed through language, it is more than language. Within it are sedimented traditional symbols and values which form the basis for schemata by which reality is interpreted. (These schemata can probably be reduced to a series of propositions about reality which form the basis of what anthropologists call culture.) Not only does the idiom enable the articulation of an explicit psychology but it renders possible the articulation of subjective experience. By "explicit psychology" I mean all commonly recognized assumptions about the nature of the "human psyche." These would include theories of personality, character formation, motivation, cognition, and perception.

Authoritarianism↗
PubMed1992

From DSM-I to III-R; voices of self, mastery and the other: a cultural constructivist reading of U.S. psychiatric classification.

The continual process of mental disease classification in U.S. psychiatry is assumed to reflect advancing professional knowledge of these disorders. To date, the American Psychiatric Association has developed four standard classifications, or nosologies, called Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals ('DSMs'). DSM-I, the earliest, appeared in 1952 while the most recent, DSM-III-R, appeared in 1987. This paper employs a cultural constructivist perspective to deconstruct these nosologies and the classificatory process itself. Constructivism's premises, which emphasize culture, history, meaning and the constructed nature of medical phenomena, serve as the framework for the analysis. The paper shows that professional psychiatric classification expresses an underlying cultural psychology which encompasses four phenomenological domains and one of three Western person conceptions. Classifications are found to be explorations of culturally meaningful etiologies that explain the absence of 'self control', a central ethnopsychological aspect of the idealized self. Consideration of the vantage point of the voice of classification indicates that the ideal self is gender- (male), ethnic- (German Protestant) and age-specific (adult). The ethnic self's essence, and that of the Other, is believed to be biological, itself assumed to be natural and beyond culture or bias. Consequently, the ethnopsychology constructs as biologically caused the real and imagined differences in the gender, age or culturally Other. This invidious ethnobiological essentialism acts to create and maintain self-worth through a radical differentiation of self from those represented as Other.

Anthropology, Cultural↗
PubMed1999

Psychiatrists in times of ethnonationalism.

OBJECTIVE: My goal was to determine the function served by ethnopsychological writings of prominent Croatian and Serbian psychiatrists, published between 1990 and 1998, when fierce interethnic strife between their communities occurred. METHOD: These writings, which deal with the national character of the Croats and Serbs, were analysed. RESULTS: The writings have served the function of detachment. CONCLUSION: Croatian and Serbian psychiatrists have been affected by ethnonationalist sentiments that have prevailed in their communities, and have shown bias in stereotyping each others' population.

Conflict of Interest↗
PubMed1995

Constructed selves, constructed lives: a cultural constructivist perspective of mental health nursing practice.

This paper is an analysis of the position that cultural constructivism is significant to the well-being of psychiatric and mental health discourse and practice. It focusses particularly on the nature of the 'self' as it is perceived from a Western ethnopsychological perspective. Differentiation is made between types of self which can be found in other cultural systems, both within and without Western society. A relationship is explored between the particular definition of the 'self' and discourses on therapeutic relationships, both fundamental tenets of modern mental health nursing practice. This analysis suggests that nurses should endeavour to move beyond the rhetorical, and thus constraining, ideology of individual responsibility, with which mental health practice is now engaged, and move to a basis for practice which depends on understanding clients' lived experiences.

Ethnopsychology↗
PubMed1991

The state construction of affect: political ethos and mental health among Salvadoran refugees.

This essay seeks to extend current anthropological theorizing on emotion. Although anthropologists have convincingly established the specifically cultural status of emotion, recognition also of "state" (including sociopolitical institutions of nation-states) constructions of affect has been slow in coming. The present essay seeks to expand the emerging scholarly discourse on the emotions by examining the nexus among the role of the state in constructing a political ethos, the personal emotions of those who dwell in that ethos, and the mental health consequences for refugees. This analysis is intended as a bridge between analyses of the state construction of affect, on the one hand, and the phenomenology of those affects, on the other. To illustrate, I examine the state construction of affect and its traces in the narrative and clinical presentations of Salvadoran refugees in North America. The saliency of fear and anxiety among a group of psychiatric out-patients is framed by bodily experience, knowledge of illness, and the ethnopsychology of emotion within the context of chronic political violence and poverty. Distinctions between terror and torture, distress and disease are proposed as essential to an account of refugee experience. Future directions for the study of the "state construction of affect" are suggested.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1995

Emil Kraepelin and comparative sociocultural psychiatry.

Emil Kraepelin, well known as the principal designer of modern psychiatric nosology, is less well known for his pioneering work in comparative sociocultural psychiatry. This paper is trying to document Kraepelin's role as the inaugurator of systematic investigations into culture-dependent differences in psychopathology. Despite his many responsibilities as clinician, teacher, hospital administrator and scientific author, Kraepelin considered cross-cultural comparison of such importance that he spent considerable time on the preparation of then very cumbersome overseas expeditions. His first research journey in 1904 to Southeast Asia led to the programmatic formulation of comparative psychiatry as a scientific endeavour designed to contribute to the better understanding of psychopathological processes and to a comprehensive comparative ethnopsychology ("Voelkerpsychologie"). Kraepelin's main cross-cultural research project, planned to extend to seven non-European countries and to involve many foreign colleagues, was prevented by World War I and postwar complications. One year before his unexpected death, Kraepelin conducted comparative studies with American Indian, Afro-American and Latin American patients at psychiatric institutions in the United States, Mexico and Cuba in 1925. In his writings Kraepelin commented on certain differences in the incidence and presentation of psychopathological phenomena that he considered to be due to ethnic-cultural characteristics or social conditions. This paper discusses in detail Kraepelin's observations on the pathoplastic and pathogenic effects of cultural and social factors, and demonstrates the influence of his ideas on the development of modern social and transcultural psychiatry.

Cross-Cultural Comparison↗
PubMed2004

A "coca-cola" shape: cultural change, body image, and eating disorders in San Andrés, Belize.

Eating disorders have been associated with developing nations undergoing rapid social transition, including participation in a global market economy and heavy media exposure. San Andrés, Belize, a community with many risk factors associated with the cross-cultural development of eating disorders, has shown remarkable resistance to previously documented patterns, despite a local focus on female beauty. Drawing on longitudinal person-centered ethnography with adolescent girls, this article examines why this community appears exceptional in light of the literature. First, community beauty and body image ideals and practices are explicated. Then, a protective ethnopsychology is proposed as a key mediating factor of the rapid socio-cultural change among young women. Finally, possible nascent cases of eating disordered behavior are discussed in light of their unique phenomenology: that is, having to do more with economic opportunity in the tourism industry and less with personal distress or desire for thinness. Close, meaning-centered examination of eating and body image practices may aid understanding and prevention of eating disorders among adolescents undergoing rapid social change in situations of globalization and immigration.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1989

Cultural variations in the response to psychiatric disorders and emotional distress.

Culture influences the experience and expression of distress from its inception. While Western psychiatry has identified several universal patterns of distress, there are significant geographical variations in the prevalence, symptomatology, course and outcome of psychiatric illness. Indirect evidence suggests that cultural differences in the recognition, labelling and interpretation of deviant behaviour affect the outcome of major psychiatric disorders as well as milder forms of distress. Emotion theory and the cultural concept of the person provide links between social and cognitive processes that contribute to the natural history of emotional distress. However, many current studies of ethnopsychology confound psychology (mechanisms of behaviour) and meta-psychology (theories of the self). Further advances in understanding the impact of culture on distress depend on the development of psychological and social theory that is neither ethnocentric nor naive about the wellsprings of action. Three arenas for further study are identified: (1) the handling of the gap between experience and expression; (2) the labelling of deviant behaviour and distress as voluntary or accidental; and, (3) the interpretation of symptoms as symbols or as meaningless events. Attention to these themes can guide re-thinking the assumptions of Western psychological and social theory.

Cultural Characteristics↗
PubMed2002

[Seed and harvest - German psychiatry and psychology in Perú].

The influence of German psychiatry and German psychology in Perú was very strong in the beginning of the 20(th) Century. This is not well-known either in Germany or even in Perú or seems to be forgotten. The basis of it was the influence of German philosophy of the 19(th) and 20(th) centuries. A review is being given of the work of those that we consider to have been the pioneers of the German thought in these disciplines in Perú: Juan (Giovanni) Copello, Hermilio Valdizán (1885 - 1929), Dora Mayer (1868 - 1959), Enrique Encinas (1895 - 1971), Pedro Zulen (1889 - 1925), Honorio Delgado (1892 - 1967), Walter Blumenfeld (1882 - 1967), and some of their pupils. Without these it would not have been possible to advance in the knowledge, neither would it had been possible to set the basis for a national psychology and psychiatry. Due to the development of the American theories that cropped up in the fifties and invaded the theoretical field as much as the practical one in both, psychology and psychiatry, this era has come to an end. These latter theories now prevail in the current university teaching. The "indigenous" sources, which helped to develop the psychological thought in the country were left aside, but are still very vivid in the discussions of international ethnopsychology and ethnopsychiatry.

Germany↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Sociopsychotherapeutic functions of ayahuasca healing in Amazonia.

The social and psychotherapeutic functions of healing rituals with ayahuasca among Amazonian groups are examined, and their healing effectiveness is explained in terms of Western scientific and sociopsychotherapeutic perspectives. The article includes an overview of the preparation and application of ayahuasca, the symbolic adaptations to the process of social change, the role of singing, the perceptive mode during the visionary state, and the structure of the visions. It is noted that the healing activities provide the entire community access to transcendental experiences, which clearly have integrative and cohesive social functions. Ethnopsychology provides important insights into the functions of archaic healing rituals, and can be used to illustrate the transcendental experiences and pathological use of drugs in modern societies.

Colombia↗
PubMed1993

[Culture and mental illness among the Inuit of Nunavik].

While the major psychiatric disorders described in current nosology can be found among the Inuit of Northern Québec (Nunavik), there are important cultural influences on the symptomatology, social response and course of these disorders. A literature review, consideration of experiences with psychiatric consultation among the Inuit and the preliminary results of ongoing ethnographic research underscore the importance of the study of Inuit ethnopsychology and current attitudes toward the mentally ill in developing culturally sensitive psychiatric care.

Adult↗