Transcultural Aspects of Affective Disorders

Abstract

Dysphoria is a universal human phenomenon, while the concepts of depressive disorder were developed within a Western intellectual culture. Clearly, the utility of these concepts would be enhanced if their applicability extended beyond their culture of origin. Do they adequately encompass the experience of dysphoria in other cultures? This question has both conceptual and empirical aspects, which I explore in this paper. First, it is clear that the experience of depression is recognizable in any culture in which it has been sought, although in some cases the expression of distress is primarily couched in somatic terms or through the use of somatic metaphors. Secondly, the psychological components can usually be elicited even where they are not volunteered. Thirdly, although there may be indigenous categories of mental illness, this does not invalidate the application of international psychiatric categories for epidemiological purposes, since the latter are heuristic devices that derive their justification from their empirical utility. I then go on to review the (so far scanty) literature relevant to cross-cultural epidemiological study.