/lit/ - Literature

>>19290460
I would like to believe that those even semi-interested in psychology or related fields would know of the influence culture and society have in the development of mental disorders. I think it is a wide known fact that a person's surroundings impact his mental health and. Just look at history and how the ways of expressing psychological conditions changed over time.

From "The Americanization of Mental Illness" in NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html :
>“We might think of the culture as possessing a ‘symptom repertoire’ — a range of physical symptoms available to the unconscious mind for the physical expression of psychological conflict... In some epochs, convulsions, the sudden inability to speak or terrible leg pain may loom prominently in the repertoire. In other epochs patients may draw chiefly upon such symptoms as abdominal pain, false estimates of body weight and enervating weakness as metaphors for conveying psychic stress.”

The symptoms doctors viewed as legitimate differed from one area to another. The ‘symptom repertoire’ was local. But this is no longer the case. The sudden rise of anorexia in Hong Kong is a great example of how cultural trends influence the expression of psychological conditions -- of how a model of expression specific to the West was introduced and then quickly adopted into the symptom repertoire of Hong Kong teenagers.

>"Dr. Sing Lee, a psychiatrist and researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, watched the Westernization of a mental illness firsthand. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was busy documenting a rare and culturally specific form of anorexia nervosa in Hong Kong. Unlike American anorexics, most of his patients did not intentionally diet nor did they express a fear of becoming fat. The complaints of Lee’s patients were typically somatic — they complained most frequently of having bloated stomachs. Lee was trying to understand this indigenous form of anorexia and, at the same time, figure out why the disease remained so rare."
>"As he was in the midst of publishing his finding that food refusal had a particular expression and meaning in Hong Kong, the public’s understanding of anorexia suddenly shifted. On Nov. 24, 1994, a teenage anorexic girl named Charlene Hsu Chi-Ying collapsed and died on a busy downtown street in Hong Kong. The death caught the attention of the media and was featured prominently in local papers."
>"In trying to explain what happened to Charlene, local reporters often simply copied out of American diagnostic manuals. The mental-health experts quoted in the Hong Kong papers and magazines confidently reported that anorexia in Hong Kong was the same disorder that appeared in the United States and Europe. In the wake of Charlene’s death, the transfer of knowledge about the nature of anorexia (including how and why it was manifested and who was at risk) went only one way: from West to East."