cultural bias in the diagnosis of mental health issues

• COCHRANE reported the incidence of schiz in the West Indies to be similar to the UK (1%)

  people of Afro-Caribbean origin living in Britain are 7x more likely to be diagnosed with schiz suggesting there is a cultural bias in diagnosis
• one of the first rank symptoms of schiz is identified in the DSM-5 is hallucinations with the most common is hearing voices

  however this is an experience that is common in some cultures and not considered to be a symptom of mental illness
• LUHRMANN found that more than half of her Indian sample heard voices of Kin and nine viewed their voices as spirits or something magical, such as Hindu God Hanuman

  the criteria used to judge mental health are therefore culturally relative and should not be used to judge others of different cultures
• Some types of abnormality are culturally specific and exist only in certain cultures, like ‘Koro’, which, is an illness only found in South East Asia, China and Africa, where a man believes that his penis or nipples are fatally retracting into his body
• Kayak’ is sometimes suffered by the Inuit people of Greenland – acute anxiety about drowning or getting lost at sea – often diagnosed in seal hunters who have to sail alone

  The existence of such culturally specific disorders highlights the issues with trying to develop a truly universal classification system
• On the other hand, cultural relativism has become recognised in the recent revision of the DSM (DSM-5) which makes reference to cultural contexts in diagnosis. For example, in ‘panic attacks’ a note is made that uncontrollable crying maybe a symptom in some cultures, whereas difficulty breathing may be the primary symptom in other cultures.