Culture bias

• Culture bias is due to Western mental health benchmarks, most psychiatrists are middle class, white males who may fail to see things from alternate perspectives
• Reliability

  • Keith
  • 2.1% of African Americans have a SZ diagnosis
  • 1.4% of white Americans
  • should be 1% universally
  • because the diagnosis methods have been developed in Western cultures, they are applied using Westernised ideas of mental health
  • when the psychiatrist and patient are from different cultural backgrounds (cross-cultural assessments), the classification systems are interpreted and applied differently
• Validity - Escobar

  • found that there is a culture bias in the validity of SZ diagnosis
  • he found white psychiastrists tend to over-interpret symptoms and in general distrust black people during assessments
  • suggests the subjectivity of psychiatrists can lead to misinterpretation of behaviours, incorrectly interpreting them as symptoms due to differences in cultural norms
  • e.g. hearing voices is a SZ symptom in Western society but in an Eastern society it may be seen as a blessing
  • = resulting in the misdiagnosis of SZ in the people from different cultural heritages (than their own)
• Implications of misdiagnoses

  • may skew knowledge and understanding
  • it may appear to be more prevalent in certain ethnic groups (e.g. African Americans at 2.1%) when its actually due to overdiagnosis
  • this overdiagnosis may cause people to be inaccurately affected by the stigmatism and economic consequences of a diagnosis of SZ, e.g. social isolation