Culture and the origins of illness

One thing particularly caught my eye ...

"And yet we do not question why it is precisely in THIS culture that schizophrenia is so prevalent"

(1) I'm curious as to where you got this impression ? I've seen a number of cross-cultural analyses of schizophrenia. It seems to be found in all, some more than others. It is definitely not just found in the West, nor just recently. Obviously diagnostic criteria differ. But it seems to me that the core positive and negative symptoms are fairly distinctive. Is it possible that you're looking at Thomas Szasz' argument from a number of years ago, before this research was done ? He had a number of good points, (and probably still does regarding other illnesses) but every year the research weakened his case regarding schizophrenia, and now it is in shambles scientifically.

A much better case, in comparison, might possibly be made for dissociative identity disorder ("multiple personalities") being an internallization of social processes, based on its being considered so prevalent in North America and so rare elsewhere.

(2) Statistical differences from one culture to another have many explanations that are much more plausible than assuming that schizophrenia is a cultural construction. Even a mostly genetic trait expresses itself differently in different environments.

Anorexia nervosa has a much better claim to be specific to cultures of abundance. Even there, though, note that the cultural specificity can be interpreted in other ways than claiming it is a purely cultural construction. There's no reason why a common biological predisposition for anorexia might not manifest in different ways in different environments.

There is a rich research tradition that seems to show that certain types of problem once considered "psychosomatic" have a common predispositional root but are manifested differently in different environments. The common root was long considered to be something buried in the psychodynamic unconscious, but it may well turn out to be explainable in less mystical terms.

kind regards,

Todd

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