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 and which asserts that schizophrenia is fundamentally similar across cultural groups, with differences expressed only in the content (e.g. demons, government conspiracy) of symptoms, not in terms of the underlying cause and structure [3,4]. As I shall discuss below schizophrenia may take different forms in different. The question rises as to whether cross cultural findings suggest that schizophrenia is a discreet diagnostic entity? This is not a systematic review; rather I have deliberately chosen studies that clearly indicate cultural influences on schizophrenia and contribute to the debate on its diagnostic status.

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