Cross-cultural Psychiatry

1994 ◽  
Vol 165 (4) ◽  
pp. 561-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Dein

“Insanity is then a part of the price we pay for civilisation. The causes of the one increase with the developments and results of the other” (Jarvis, 1851).Emil Kraepelin, while visiting southeast Asia at the turn of the century, noted the absence of depression among various Asian populations. He believed that mental disorders were organic diseases for which specific pathogens would ultimately be found. Despite the cultural variations in mental disorders he observed during his world trip in 1904, he considered mental disorder to be universal: “mental illness in Java showed broadly the same clinical picture as we see in our country … The overall similarity far outweighed the deviant features.”

1887 ◽  
Vol 33 (142) ◽  
pp. 230-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Heimann

Certain therapeutic effects upon the human organism ascribed to cocaine,∗ occasioned me to make use of the drug in suitable cases of psychosis and psycho-neurosis. Stimulant action and exhilaration (Euphoria) on the one hand, and on the other depression of undue sensitiveness, these were the effects I looked for from the alkaloid. Unfortunately, I am able to record scarcely a single case of certain and permanent cure following the use of the drug.


2005 ◽  
Vol 187 (3) ◽  
pp. 203-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Weiser ◽  
Jim van Os ◽  
Michael Davidson

SummaryMany manifestations of mental illness, risk factors, course and even response to treatment are shared by several diagnostic groups. For example, cognitive and social impairments are present to some degree in most DSM and ICD diagnostic groups. The idea that diagnostic boundaries of mental illness, including schizophrenia, have to be redefined is reinforced by recent findings indicating that on the one hand multiple genetic factors, each exerting a small effect, come together to manifest as schizophrenia, and on the other hand, depending on interaction with the environment, the same genetic variations can present as diverse clinical phenotypes. Rather than attempting to find a unitary biological explanation for a DSM construct of schizophrenia, it would be reasonable to deconstruct it into the most basic manifestations, some of which are common with other DSM constructs, such as cognitive or social impairment, and then investigate the biological substrate of these manifestations.


1966 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 74-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert M. Spector

On his mother's side, W. Cameron Forbes was the grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and on his father's, the grandson of John Murray Forbes, who made his fortune in the China clipper trade. He carried in his heredity the shrewd business ability of the one and the liberalism of the other. In Hofstadter's turn of phrase, he was the patrician as liberal. His wealth, his education — the best available (Milton Academy, Hopkinson School, Harvard) — would have entitled him to admittance to the innermost recesses of post-Civil War Republicanism. Yet he remained at best only affiliated with that party, and at heart an outspoken Independent. In 1892, on graduation from Harvard, he joined Stone and Webster, later gained experience in business as officer and director of several Boston banks, and then, just before the turn of the century, joined the family firm of J. M. Forbes and Co., Merchants.


2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (9) ◽  
pp. 3-14
Author(s):  
Agustinus Supriyadi

Catholic teens Indonesia is part of the Church in Indonesia and the Indonesian people. Indonesia consists of thousands of islands that stretched from Sabang to Merauke. This fact opens the possibility of a fairly wide occurrence of the encounter between cultures and simultaneous cross-cultural. This diversity is certainly a logical consequence to an enrichment of civilizations and diversity (plurality), although also contains elements of the loss. Plurality of Indonesian society on the one hand can make the Catholic teens swept away in the swift currents of the community to lose our identity or conflict. However Plurality can also awaken in the Catholic teen award nature between one race to the other races, between ethnic or tribal one with the other tribes, between groups with one another. In a pluralistic society such as this, the Catholic teens called to the apostolate. Through the act of self-discovery, live in love and have a sense of tolerance of differences is the real form of the apostolate.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Romano

Against the backdrop of a critical reflection on the psychiatric concepts of organicism and predisposition to mental illness, the research investigates the relationship between psychiatry and the Great War from a perspective that considers the complexity of the orientations assumed by both the Italian alienists on war pathologies and the health practices implemented towards soldiers. The study highlights the comparison/clash between two totally different approaches forced to coexist during the conflict: on one side, the one from military psychiatry, and on the other the distinctive one from civil asylums. The two perspectives were not always clearly separated, but it is possible to detect a constant tension between the duties towards the war effort and the professional ethics dictated by the neuropsychiatric discipline.


Author(s):  
Katja Garloff

This chapter jumps to the turn of the century, when the rise of racial antisemitism fostered a new Jewish self-awareness and rendered “interracial” love and marriage central to the public debates about German Jewish identity. It analyzes three German Jewish writers of different and paradigmatic political orientations, who used love stories to diagnose the reasons for the faltering of emancipation: the assimilationist Ludwig Jacobowski, the Zionist Max Nordau, and the mainstream liberal Georg Hermann. Their works, including Jacobowski's Werther the Jew (1892), Nordau's Doctor Kohn (1899), and Hermann's Jettchen Gebert (1906), show how love stories potentially escape the ideological constraints of increasingly racialized models of identity. On the one hand, the love plot affords an opportunity to expose the obstacles encountered by Jews seeking integration in times of rising antisemitism. On the other hand, the open endings of most love stories and the ambiguous use of racial language allow the authors to eschew a final verdict on the success or failure of integration. The chapter argues that the love plot generates a host of equivocations between the social and the biological, and the particular and the universal, creating a metaphorical surplus that opens up venues to rethink the project of Jewish emancipation and assimilation.


Author(s):  
Jonathan O. Chimakonam

The chapter aims to do two things: 1) a rigorous presentation of philosophy of African logic and 2) to do this from the perspective of Ezumezu (an African) logic. The chapter will proceed by defining the three aspects of Ezumezu logic namely: 1) as a formal system, 2) as methodology, and 3) as a philosophy of African logic. My inquiry in this work primarily is with the philosophy of African logic but it will also cut across formal logic and methodology in addition. In the first section, I will attempt to show how the cultural influence behind the formulation of the principles of African logic justifies such a system as relative on the one hand, and how the cross-cultural applications justify it as universal on the other. I believe that this is where African philosophical assessment of African logic ought to begin because most critics of the idea of African logic agitate that an African system of logic, if it is ever possible, must necessarily lack the tincture of universal applicability. Afterwards, I will narrow my inquiry down to the African philosophy appraisal of African logic with an example of Ezumezu system. This focus is especially critical because it purveys a demonstration of a prototype system of an African logic. In the section on some principles of Ezumezu logic, I will attempt to accomplish the set goal of this chapter by presenting and discussing some principles of Ezumezu logic which I had formulated in earlier works in addition to formulating a few additional ones. The interesting thing to note here is that these principles are/will all (be) articulated from the African background ontology. I will conclude by throwing further light on the merits, nature and promises of an African logic tradition.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 366-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siba Ghrear ◽  
Maciej Chudek ◽  
Klint Fung ◽  
Sarah Mathew ◽  
Susan A. J. Birch

AbstractWe examined the universality of the curse of knowledge (i.e., the tendency to be biased by one’s knowledge when inferring other perspectives) by investigating it in a unique cross-cultural sample; a nomadic Nilo-Saharan pastoralist society in East Africa, the Turkana. Forty Turkana children were asked eight factual questions and asked to predict how widely-known those facts were among their peers. To test the effect of their knowledge, we taught children the answers to half of the questions, while the other half were unknown. Based on findings suggesting the bias’s universality, we predicted that children would estimate that more of their peers would know the answers to the questions that were taught versus the unknown questions. We also predicted that with age children would become less biased by their knowledge. In contrast, we found that only Turkana males were biased by their knowledge when inferring their peers’ perspectives, and the bias did not change with age. We discuss the implications of these findings.


2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 335-361
Author(s):  
Brian Schroeder

Abstract This essay considers the relation between two fundamentally different notions of place—the Greek concept of χώρα and the Japanese concept of basho 場所—in an effort to address the question of a possible “other beginning” to philosophy by rethinking the relation between nature and the elemental. Taking up a cross-cultural comparative approach, ancient through contemporary Eastern and Western sources are considered. Central to this endeavor is reflection on the concept of the between through an engagement between, on the one hand, Plato, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Edward Casey, and John Sallis, and on the other, Eihei Dōgen, Nishida Kitarō, and Watsuji Tetsurō.


2020 ◽  

Whereas democracy still seemed to be triumphantly sweeping the world before the turn of the century, today it finds itself under immense pressure, not only as a viable political system, but also as a theoretical and normative concept. The coronavirus crisis has underlined and accelerated these developments. There are manifold reasons for this, above all the fundamental changes the state and society have undergone in the face of globalisation, digitalisation, migration, climate change and not least the current pandemic, to name the most significant of them. This volume analyses the changes to democracy in the 21st century and the crises it has experienced. In doing so, the book identifies where action is needed, on the one hand, and investigates appropriate, up-to-date reforms and the prospects for politics, political communication and political education, on the other. With contributions by Ulrich von Alemann, Bernd Becker, Frank Brettschneider, Frank Decker, Claudio Franzius, Georg Paul Hefty, Andreas Kalina, Helmut Klages, Uwe Kranenpohl, Pola Lehmann, Linus Leiten, Dirk Lüddecke, Thomas Metz, Ursula Münch, Ursula Alexandra Ohliger, Veronika Ohliger, Rainer-Olaf Schultze, Peter Seyferth, Hans Vorländer, Uwe Wagschal, Thomas Waldvogel and Samuel Weishaupt


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document