Psychopathology And Culture Essay

Understanding the relationship between of culture on psychopathology has been topic of considerable interest. Psychologists have been divided into two main schools, the first being the perspective of cultural relativism i.e. abnormal behaviour must be interpreted within the cultural framework in which the behaviour is happening. It believes that psychopathology and culture are interwoven. The second view believes that culture is important to understand the context in which the behaviour is happening, however there are cross culture similarities as well as universalities in the experience as well as the outcome of psychological disorders.

In an attempt to solve this conflict, there have been a number of researches conducted over the years by psychologies to study the interaction between culture and psycho pathology. The latest attempt to understand psychopathology in relation to the cultural context is the DSM – V which defines a mental disorder as- "A mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotion regulation, or behaviour that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying

Without culture we cannot describe pathological behaviour. The culture of an individual is extremely important to diagnose, understand and treat the disorder. To better understand the importance the role of culture in the ethology of psychopathology we can look at cultural factors that are important in understating the etiologic factors causing psychological disorders. One of the first factors that cause disorders are biological factors. Even though biology may seem like a factor that is not effected by culture, it is evident that a disorder is expressed similarly throughout a culture because of the biological symmetry of individuals of that