tseWEast

"'This project reflects very much my personal way of seeing things,' Liu told Quartz. She said that moving as a child gave her the habit of comparing situations and interactions. 'Many situations are better understood if they can be seen in relation.'"

(Quartz)

"Asian American children are therefore brought up believing that their families are bad. For white families and families of color, responsible and firm parenting is celebrated, while for Asian families, they are shameful and problematic."

(Planamag)

"After I learned all this, and what it means for us all, I started to long for the power to go back in time and speak to my teenage self on the day he was told a story about his depression that was going to send him off in the wrong direction for so many years. I wanted to tell him: 'This pain you are feeling is not a pathology. It’s not crazy. It is a signal that your natural psychological needs are not being met. It is a form of grief – for yourself, and for the culture you live in going so wrong...It is telling you that you need to be connected in so many deep and stirring ways that you aren’t yet – but you can be, one day.'” (The Guardian)

Sociological work in this area can be traced back to the work of Emile Durkheim, and in particular to his work on the normal and pathological (1964 [1895]). His major insight is wellknown: that the rules and standards that define what is pathological help to reinforce the norms and values of society ± the normal and the pathological are mutually constitutive ± and societies and social groups define the pathological in order to sustain and strengthen the normal...rules that define the normal and pathological vary according to the values of the social group and in that respect what is constituted as mental disorder is socially and culturally relative...there is always and necessarily an element of social control in the application of rules, including the rules as to what is normal and what pathological."

(Department of Sociology, University of Essex)

"Culture and the ethnic group that people come from are important aspects of health and illness. A new branch of medicine, known as ethnomedicine, focuses on the role of culture, perception, and context in shaping someone's physical and mental health."

(Gulf Bend Center) 

"What becomes clear is that culture and social contexts, while not the only determinants, shape the mental health of minorities and alter the types of mental health services they use. Cultural misunderstandings between patient and clinician, clinician bias, and the fragmentation of mental health services deter minorities from accessing and utilizing care and prevent them from receiving appropriate care. These possibilities intensify with the demographic trends highlighted at the end of the chapter."

(A Report of the Surgeon General)

"We learn a particular worldview growing up in a specific culture, and these patterns of thought permeate our psychology." (Psychology Today)

"This data from China presents a fundamental challenge to Western psychiatrists, Kleinman said, 'to rethink suicide' and 'to examine to what degree depression associated with suicide is not the cause of suicide, but simply is an outcome of social-psychological conditions, just like the suicide is.'" (Psychiatric Times)

"For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders...now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness."

(The New York Times)

"Mental illness, as the eminent historian of psychiatry Michael MacDonald once aptly remarked, 'is the most solitary of afflictions to the people who experience it; but it is the most social of maladies to those who observe its effects' (MacDonald 1981: 1).  It is precisely the many social and cultural dimensions of mental illness, of course, that have made the subject of such compelling interest to sociologists.  They have responded in a huge variety of ways to the enormously wide social ramifications of mental illness, and the inextricable ways in which the cultural and the social are implicated in what some might view as a purely intrapsychic phenomenon."

(Mad in America) 

"Research exists which correlates membership in an oppressed group with susceptibility to various mental illnesses, specifically depression (Burns, et al., 1995). Being a member of an oppressed group makes one susceptible to life circumstances and stressors that leave one vulnerable. Oppression becomes a multiplying psychosocial factor that can lead to an increase in depressive symptoms."

(The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare) 

"One implication of the cyclical, transactional relationship between cultures and psyches is that culture is not an independent variable. Culture may predict, but it does not 'cause.' A second implication is that neither cultures nor psychologies exist independent of each other. Without human beings, cultures don’t exist, and without cultures, human beings don’t exist. Indeed, theorists increasingly argue that what separates humans from other species is our ability to produce and perpetuate cultures."

(Association for Psychological Science)