Recent Work on Culture and Schizophrenia: Epidemiological and Anthropological Approaches - Juniper Publishers
Recent Work on Culture and Schizophrenia: Epidemiological and Anthropological Approaches| Juniper Publishers Authored by Simon Dein Schizophrenia is observed worldwide in diverse cultures. However as Abed & Abbas [ 1 ] note, the supposed universality of the incidence and prevalence of schizophrenia has been seriously challenged. It is now widely accepted that the life-time prevalence and incidence of this disorder vary considerably in time and place. A lower, 50% concordance between identical twins suggests that environmental or stochastic influences play a significant role in its causation [ 2 ]. Here I discuss the role of culture on presentation, attributions and outcomes citing studies by both psychiatric epidemiologists and anthropologists. Transcultural psychiatrists have often argued that schizophrenia is universal: it has similar manifestations in all cultures. This view is consistent with the patho plastic model which is dominant in Western psychiatry