Transkulturelle Psychiatrie/Psychotherapie

Guilt and Depression: A Cross-Cultural Comparative Study

“…Depressive ideas and delusions are limited to a very few themes: guilt, hypochondria, impoverishment [2][3][4][5] and nihilistic and persecutory ideas [6,7]. Whereas ideas of guilt seem to be frequent in Europe and Northern America, they were almost totally denied by authors like Murphy et al [8] for Eastern cultures.…”

Culture-Specific Mental Disorders

“…the culturally immanent or "emic" Standpoint is given priority over the culturally overreaching or "etic" perspective of the scientific observer (these current terms of American anthropology were formed in vague analogy to the linguistic terms "phonemic" and "phonetic"). It is hardly of assistance to cross-cultural psychiatric research, however, when such apparent antagonisms are carried to the extreme on theoretical grounds; instead, the culturally immanent and culturally overreaching perspectives ought to complement each other (Pfeiffer 1994). These tendencies of the so-called new transcultural psychiatry refiect the pronounced cultural relativism that exerted great infiuence on twentieth-century Anglo-American anthropology, while French anthropology, represented by the works of Claude Levi-Strauss, strove to extract the basic and universal structures of human thought processes out of cultural diversity.…”

“…As several authors have stressed, most cases of bouffee delirante have no organic or infectious cause. Transient psychotic or psychosis-like reactions evoked by the acute fear of being affected by magic are in no way a specific phenomenon of African cultures; they have been described with some frequency in other parts of the world, including Indonesia (Pfeiffer 1994) and Tanga (Jilek 1988) as weil as in southern European migrant workers (Labhardt 1963;Risso and Böker 1964). In their manifestations and course, bouffee delirante-type conditions are reminiscent of two nineteenth-century disease entities: the "transient amentia" of the Vienna School (Meynert 1889) and folie hysterique, the "hysterical psychosis" first described by Morel (1860) in Paris, a diagnostic concept revived by American authors in the 1960s with special reference to transient psychotic reactions in nonWestern cultures (Hallender and Hirsch 1964;Langness 1967;Hirsch and Hollender 1969).…”

“…The first Englishlanguage textbook of transcultural psychiatry (Kiev 1972) contained a division of the culture-bound mental disorders into anxiety states, obsessional compulsive neuroses, hysterical disorders, phobic states, depressive reactions, and dissociative states. With all due respect to these attempts to seek "unity in the diversity" of culture-bound syndromes (Sartorius 1979), it can only be concluded, from the perspective of transcultural psychiatry, that harmonization of indigenous ethnic terminology with a psychiatric diagnostic system is not possible (Pfeiffer 1980(Pfeiffer , 1994Littlewood and Lipsedge 1985). A nosologic classification is neither scientifically nor clinically satisfactory, as the diagnosis-determining manifestations of most culture-bound syndromes overlap, and the indigenous disease terms are semantically overlaid with traditional meanings and interpretations of folk medicine that significantly influence both the illness behavior of the affected person and the reactions of others.…”

“…In the Malay-Indonesian culture area, latah is regarded more as a personal trait than as an illness and is generally not thought of as an indication for traditional healing treatment. However, thorough history-taking often reveals that the first occurrence of latah was at a time of particular mental stress and/or was associated with a depressive reaction ( Pfeiffer 1994).…”