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Social Anthropology in Relation to Psychiatry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Roland Littlewood
Roland Littlewood*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychiatry, Birmingham University, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham B15 2TH
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Extract

The relationship between psychopathology and culture remains a vexed question. Whilst organic reactions (and by extension the ‘functional’ psychoses) can be conveniently coded in terms of an invariate biologically determined form and a culturally variable content, the same is not true of those reactions which we might feel are characteristic of Western society: agoraphobia, anorexia nervosa, self-poisoning, Briquet's syndrome or the chronic pain syndromes. When cultural explanations are offered, however, they usually employ naive and implicit anthropological assumptions, and it is perhaps only the phenomenon of conversion hysteria in the nineteenth century which has been adequately related to its social context (Ellenberger, 1970).

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Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 146 , Issue 5 , May 1985 , pp. 552 - 554
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 The Royal College of Psychiatrists 

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