Beliefs and Delusions of West Indian Immigrants to London

Abstract

Psychiatrists have for long paid attention to mental illness in different communities and cultures. In Java, Kraepelin noted that melancholia and mania were rare and that depressive reactions rarely contained elements of sinfulness (9). Later, Bleuler commented upon differences between English and Irish patients and between Bavarian and Saxon patients (2). Others have described various “culture-bound” syndromes such as amok, the windigo psychosis of the Cree, Salteaux and Ojibwa, latah and Arctic hysteria (23, 5, 8, 11, 26). More recently Tooth has described a special category of “delusional” states in West Africans while Carothers has reported on “ill-defined” states and “primitive” psychoses among the West Africans (22, 4). Other workers have stressed the significance of cultural factors in the distribution of mental illness. Seligman noted in 1929 that confusional states were more common than systematized insanities among the Papuans of New Guinea and could not find any cases of manic depressive illness (17). Berne noted that toxic confusional psychoses rather than the schizophrenias were the predominant illness among hospitalized Malay (1). Carothers related Westernization to an increase in manifest paranoid behaviour among patients in Kenya (4). Similarly Spiro noted that the Ifaluk in the Carolines had violent paranoid outbursts only after Japanese occupation and Slotkin emphasized the paranoid schizophrenia phenomena among acculturated Menomini (20, 19). Opler found that lower class Filipinos had a high proportion of affective disorders and catatonic confusional states among the Hawaiian hospitalized, while Carothers and Tooth in Africa both found statistically low incidences of depression and suicidal states with relatively high rates of confusional states among African natives (13, 4, 22).