Transcultural Psychiatry

TRANSCULTURAL PSYCHIATRY is a discipline that is approximately as old as the field of psychoanalysis. Kraepelin is usually credited with first studying the correlation of culture and mental illness. Freud, Jung, and Adler, independently of Kraepelin, and each from his own vantage point, developed an interest in the connections between cultural phenomena and neurotic or psychotic manifestations. Then came the era of the so-called cultural schools of psychoanalysis, which include Horney, Sullivan, Kardiner, and others. Attempting to transcend the intrapsychic aspects of mental disorders, they placed increasing emphasis on particular modes of acculturation and socialization in the genesis of psychopathology. Around the same time an interdisciplinary approach emerged; anthropologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, behaviorists, and other experts in the social sciences worked together as teams. The height of that particular form of collaboration occurred in the 1930's and 1940's. Unfortunately, a period of latency followed. In recent years there has been renewed interest in cross-cultural and transcultural psychiatry. Thus far no consensus on acceptable standards, procedures, and goals for the discipline has been achieved.

It has become customary to speak of transcultural psychiatry (according to Ruesch and Wittkower) as a branch of social psychiatry. As such, it focuses mainly on those cultural factors that are related to the aetiology, frequency, and nature of mental disorders, and the care and aftercare of emotionally maladjusted people within the confines of a given cultural unit. The term cross-cultural ordinarily applies to comparisons of one culture with another. Transcultural is a more global term, implying an observational platform that transcends specific cultures. In addition, there is emerging an international psychiatry. This is concerned more specifically with teaching and training facilities in the psychiatric specialty, and also encompasses