Culture And Common Mental Disorders In Sub-Saharan Africa

The influence of culture on mental illness has been the subject of considerable academic investigation and debate in recent years. This debate has provoked concerns about the validity and reliability of older methodologies which emphasised either universal characteristics of disorders which were heavily biased towards Euro-American systems, or the culturally relativist approach which saw psychological disorders as products largely of their own culture. The "new" cross-cultural psychiatry pr...