Cultural Differences
Classification schemes may not apply to all cultures. The DSM is based on predominantly American research studies and has been said to have a decidedly American outlook, meaning that differing disorders or concepts of illness from other cultures (including personalistic rather than naturalistic explanations) may be neglected or misrepresented, while Western cultural phenomena may be taken as universal. Culture-bound syndromes are those hypothesized to be specific to certain cultures (typically taken to mean non-Western or non-mainstream cultures); while some are listed in an appendix of the DSM-IV they are not detailed and there remain open questions about the relationship between Western and non-Western diagnostic categories and sociocultural factors, which are addressed from different directions by, for example, cross-cultural psychiatry or anthropology.
Read more about this topic: Classification Of Mental Disorders
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or differences:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“I don’t know what immutable differences exist between men and women apart from differences in their genitals; perhaps there are some other unchangeable differences; probably there are a number of irrelevant differences. But it is clear that until social expectations for men and women are equal, until we provide equal respect for both men and women, our answers to this question will simply reflect our prejudices.”
—Naomi Weisstein (b. 1939)