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Do some cultures have their own ways of going mad?

As psychiatry revises its manual of disorders, it faces a sticky question: what to do about “culture-bound syndromes”

By Latif Nasser

 |   

  January 08, 2012

Call it the Pibloktoq problem: What should we make of the fact that some mental disorders seem to appear only in certain cultures? As the psychiatric establishment revises the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the question of what to do about “culture-bound syndromes” (brain fag, “soul loss”) raises key questions about whether mental illnesses are universal—or partly a function of particular societies.

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