Medical anthropology studies "human health and disease, health care systems, and biocultural adaptation". It views humans from multidimensional and ecological perspectives. It is one of the most highly developed areas of anthropology and applied anthropology, and is a subfield of social and cultural anthropology that examines the ways in which culture and society are organized around or influenced by issues of health, health care and related issues.
Koro is a culture-bound syndrome delusional disorder in which an individual has an overpowering belief that one's sex organs are retracting and will disappear, despite the lack of any true longstanding changes to the genitals. Koro is also known as shrinking penis, and it is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The syndrome occurs worldwide, and mass hysteria of genital-shrinkage anxiety has a history in Africa, Asia, and Europe. In the United States and Europe, the syndrome is commonly known as genital retraction syndrome. The condition can be diagnosed through psychological assessment along with physical examination to rule out genuine disorders of the genitalia that could be causing true retraction.
Cross-cultural studies, sometimes called holocultural studies or comparative studies, is a specialization in anthropology and sister sciences that uses field data from many societies to examine the scope of human behavior and test hypotheses about human behavior and culture. Cross-cultural studies is the third form of cross-cultural comparisons. The first is comparison of case studies, the second is controlled comparison among variants of a common derivation, and the third is comparison within a sample of cases. Unlike comparative studies, which examines similar characteristics of a few societies, cross-cultural studies uses a sufficiently large sample so that statistical analysis can be made to show relationships or lack of relationships between the traits in question. These studies are surveys of ethnographic data.
Family values, sometimes referred to as familial values, are traditional or cultural values that pertain to the family's structure, function, roles, beliefs, attitudes, and ideals.
The World Psychiatric Association is an international umbrella organisation of psychiatric societies.
In medicine and medical anthropology, a culture-bound syndrome, culture-specific syndrome, or folk illness is a combination of psychiatric and somatic symptoms that are considered to be a recognizable disease only within a specific society or culture. There are no objective biochemical or structural alterations of body organs or functions, and the disease is not recognized in other cultures. The term culture-bound syndrome was included in the fourth version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders which also includes a list of the most common culture-bound conditions. Counterpart within the framework of ICD-10 are the culture-specific disorders defined in Annex 2 of the Diagnostic criteria for research.
Henri Frédéric Ellenberger was a Canadian psychiatrist, medical historian, and criminologist, sometimes considered the founding historiographer of psychiatry. Ellenberger is chiefly remembered for The Discovery of the Unconscious, an encyclopedic study of the history of dynamic psychiatry published in 1970.
Madeleine Leininger was a nursing theorist, nursing professor and developer of the concept of transcultural nursing. First published in 1961, her contributions to nursing theory involve the discussion of what it is to care.
Armando Favazza is an American author and psychiatrist best known for his studies of cultural psychiatry, deliberate self-harm, and religion. Favazza's Bodies Under Siege: Self-mutilation in Culture and Psychiatry (1987) was the first psychiatric book on this topic. His 2004 work, PsychoBible: Behavior, Religion, and the Holy Book presents objective data regarding commonly held misconceptions about the Bible as a whole as well as its major passages. In Kaplan and Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry he has written the chapter on "Anthropology and Psychiatry" in the 3rd edition (1980), the 4th edition (1985) and the 8th edition (2005), as well as the chapter on "Spirituality and Psychiatry" in the 9th edition (2009). He has published two cover articles in the American Journal of Psychiatry: "Foundations of Cultural Psychiatry" [135:293-303,1978] and "Modern Christian Healing of Mental Illness" [139:728-735,1982]. In 1979 he co-founded The Society for the Study of Culture and Psychiatry.
Transcultural nursing is how professional nursing interacts with the concept of culture. Based in anthropology and nursing, it is supported by nursing theory, research, and practice. It is a specific cognitive specialty in nursing that focuses on global cultures and comparative cultural caring, health, and nursing phenomena. It was established in 1955 as a formal area of inquiry and practice. It is a body of knowledge that assists in providing culturally appropriate nursing care.
Cross-cultural competence refers to the knowledge, skills, and affect/motivation that enable individuals to adapt effectively in cross-cultural environments. Cross-cultural competence is defined here as an individual capability that contributes to intercultural effectiveness regardless of the particular intersection of cultures. Although some aspects of cognition, behavior, or affect may be particularly relevant in a specific country or region, evidence suggests that a core set of competencies enables adaptation to any culture.
Cultural neuroscience is a field of research that focuses on the interrelation between a human’s cultural environment and neurobiological systems. The field particularly incorporates ideas and perspectives from related domains like anthropology, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience to study sociocultural influences on human behaviors. Such impacts on behavior are often measured using various neuroimaging methods, through which cross-cultural variability in neural activity can be examined.
The Foundation for Psychocultural Research is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in Los Angeles that supports and advances interdisciplinary and integrative research and training on interactions of culture, neuroscience, psychiatry, and psychology, with an emphasis on cultural processes as central. The primary objective is to help articulate and support the creation of transformative paradigms that address issues of fundamental clinical and social concern.
The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease is a 2010 book by the psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl, and published by Beacon Press, covering the history of the 1960s Ionia State Hospital—located in Ionia, Michigan and converted into the Ionia Correctional Facility in 1986. The facility is claimed to have been one of America's largest and most notorious state psychiatric hospitals in the era before deinstitutionalization.
Transcultural Psychiatry is a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes papers in the fields of cultural psychiatry, psychology and anthropology. The journal's editor-in-chief is Laurence J. Kirmayer. The Associate Editors are Renato Alarcón, Roland Littlewood and Leslie Swartz. It has been in publication since 1964 and is currently published by SAGE Publications on behalf of the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry of McGill University. It is the official journal of the World Psychiatric Association Transcultural Psychiatry Section and is also published in association with the Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture.
Ataque de nervios is a psychological syndrome most associated in the United States with Spanish-speaking people from the Caribbean although commonly identified among all Iberian-descended cultures. Ataque de nervios translates into English as "attack of nerves", although it is used in its common cultural form to refer to a specific pattern of symptoms, rather than being a general term for feeling nervous. The condition appears in Appendix I of the revised fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR) as a culture-bound syndrome.
Vincenzo Di Nicola is a Canadian psychologist, psychiatrist, and family therapist.
Robert Lemelson is an American cultural anthropologist, ethnographic filmmaker and philanthropist. Lemelson received his M.A. from the University of Chicago and Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Lemelson's area of specialty is transcultural psychiatry; Southeast Asian Studies, particularly Indonesia; and psychological and medical anthropology. He currently is a research anthropologist in the Semel Institute of Neuroscience UCLA, and an adjunct professor of Anthropology at UCLA. His scholarly work has appeared in numerous journals and books. Lemelson founded Elemental Productions in 2008, a documentary production company, and has directed and produced numerous ethnographic films. His blog Psychocultural Cinema contains numerous blog-posts and edited film works.
