What is cross-cultural psychiatry?

The cultural factor is something that is strongly associated with a number of psychiatric and emotional disorders. Because of this, adopting the concept of cross-cultural psychiatry when evaluating a mental disorder is very important.

Mainly because culture influences the way we conceive and express feelings and emotions. It is the cultural factor that often provides defense mechanisms for us to deal with these feelings and emotions. More than that, culture determines the level of tolerance that many people have for physical or emotional pain.

Therefore, in psychiatric care, both the culture with which the patient identifies and the culture of the psychiatrist himself must be taken into account. Even to prevent these factors from influencing the interpretation of symptoms and treatment. And it is precisely under this prism that transcultural psychiatry works.

Understand more about cross-cultural psychiatry and its importance today.

What is cross-cultural psychiatry?

Cross-cultural psychiatry is nothing more than the treatment of mental disorders that takes into account broader implications such as race, ethnicity, religion and cultural origin, for example.

In addition, other characteristics such as social class, economic conditions and gender are also considered. Mainly because these implications are constantly evolving and somehow affect people's physical and mental health.

In other words, a cross-cultural psychiatry is able to distinguish through these analyzes what is a malfunction of biological or psychological processes such as illness in the patient or what is a cultural personal reaction.

What is the importance of cross-cultural psychiatry?

To practice cross-cultural psychiatry is to also focus on the influence of cultures on the mental health of each patient.

This approach becomes essential since today's society involves enormous cultural diversity. So, it is necessary to consider the influence of these factors to improve the understanding of symptoms. And, with that, increase the effectiveness in diagnoses and treatments of syndromes and mental disorders.

People with different backgrounds and cultures feel and express themselves in different ways according to each situation. Thus, cross-cultural psychiatry helps to see each patient as a social being within a cultural context, as well as the impacts of this on their mental state.

Culture-bound mental illness (cultural bound)

Overall, there are more than 25 cultural bound syndromes, that is, diseases linked to culture. They are described in the now-expired DSM-IV R, the fourth version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

These cultural bounds are syndromes or psychological pathologies only recognized in specific cultures and normally treated by the folk medicine of the culture itself.

An example of this is insanity itself. In different beliefs, this state of mind can be interpreted in various ways.

In cultures such as African or Afro-American, trance states are, for example, visits from ancestral spirits. However, in Western countries the term for this situation would be dissociation disorder/escape disorder/depersonalization disorder.

In view of this difference in meaning attribution, transcultural psychiatry comes to help understand the origins and influences of each patient, in order to know and better portray their reality, improving diagnosis and providing better treatment effectiveness.