Cultural Psychiatry

Culture, defined as a set of behavioral patterns, lifestyle, meanings and values, shared and utilized by members of a given human group, includes a series of variables from the material (diet, housing, tools, economic practices) to the purely social or epistemological areas such as collective knowledge, habits, customs, beliefs, traditions, language, religion, social relations, and ethical principles. Culture is a dynamic phenomenon that shapes a group’s view of the world and is transmitted from generation to generation. The concept should be distinguished from two others, race (based on physical and biogenetic considerations that group individuals on the basis of physiognomic characteristics), and ethnicity that entails distinction and identification of groups on the basis of a common historical or geographic origins.

Against the background of a millenarian connection between health, disease, and culture, Cultural Psychiatry could then be defined as the sub-discipline that occupies...