“…A number of earlier scholars, such as Freud (1949) and Bleuler (1950), as well as contemporary investigators like Kiev (1969), have examined the influence of culture on mental illness, usually emphasising its effect on the characteristics of the illness. Others have focused on the related but different question of the effects of cultural factors on the distribution of psychiatric illness (Opler, 1956;Spiro, 1952). Even though various writers perceive the effects of culture in different ways, they all make the common claim that cultural factors are capable of' conditioning the basic form and structure of psychiatric symptoms, as well as their frequency distribution within any given population.…”