Mental Diseases Peculiar to Certain Cultures: A Survey of Comparative Psychiatry

Abstract

Modern psychiatry has developed in Western Europe, largely under French and German aegis, and latterly in the United States. It is pertinent to ask, since it deals with human behaviour in all its variety, if the concepts, working principles and empirically derived conclusions of psychiatry possess universal validity, wherever it might be practised. As one instance of the influence of cultural environment on psychiatric symptomatology (and also psychiatric practice), we may point to the “hysterogenic points “so often found in French hysterics by the Salpêtrière school of neurologists, who could provoke an hysterical attack or sometimes abort one by pressing on these points. Just across the Channel in England, among English hysterics, these phenomena could not be reproduced; they were, of course, special features of the disease, exhibited only in the atmosphere created by Charcot and his colleagues at that period. The psychiatrist in cultures farther removed from the civilization of Western Europe may well have reason to pause and ask if the principles and practice of orthodox psychiatry possess the same degree of truth or usefulness elsewhere than in Western Europe or America.