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Course INTH325

Culture and Psycopathology - Mental Health in a Cross-Cultural Perspective

Course offered :

Current programmes of study

Course offered by

Number of credits 3
Course offered (semester) Spring
Schedule Schedule
Reading list Reading list

Language of Instruction

English

Pre-requirements

Students admitted to a Masters degree Programme may join this course (e.g. TropEd Europe network).
Proficiency in English at a level corresponding to TOEFL 550 or IELTS band 6.0 is expected.
Physicians and dentists specialising in public health, general practitioners and other health workers with special interest in culture and psychopathology.

Learning Outcomes

At the end of the module the student should be able to

  • describe and identify the role of cultural variables in the aetiology of mental disorder.
  • explain how cultural variables interact with biological, psychological and environmental variables to influence psychopathology.
  • appraise cultural variations in standards of normality and abnormality.
  • critically evaluate cultural variations in the classification and diagnosis of psychopathology.
  • describe and determine the cultural variations in the expression, course and outcome of psychopathology, and
  • assess how cultural change affects adaptation outcome?

 

Contact Information

Centre for International Health

Tel.: +47 55588560; e-mail: studie.cih@uib.no

Course offered (semester)

Spring

Language of Instruction

English

Course Unit Level

Master and PhD

Access to the Course Unit

Open to all registered students at Master and/or PhD level at the University of Bergen.

Students admitted to a Master´s Degree Programme may also join this course (e.g. tropEd European Network).

Aim and Content

Like all systems of healing, biomedicine is a cultural product arising from Western industrialised countries. Yet practice of medicine to a large extent has shown very little cognisance to cultural and social factors. Biomedical conception of health and its practice are often transported from one part of the world to the other in packages of absolute truths. Notwithstanding great results, they have sometimes proven to be ineffective and even detrimental to the receiving group of people. Central to this problem is failure on the part of biomedicine to take into account culture's influence on people's attitudes, belief systems, conception of illness and disease, disease aetiology, and health-care seeking behaviour. In addition, while certain health problems (e.g. culture-bound syndromes) are difficult to understand using imported biomedical models from the West, they are readily understood within the cultural societies where they are manifested. The crux of this course is to examine mental illness, their manifestations, diagnosis, and treatment in different cultural societies.

The following areas of topics will be addressed during the 5-days of lectures.

  • Culture and mental illness: Concepts, issues, models and theories
  • Classification/grouping of mental disorders in diagnostic manuals: culture and methodology
  • Review of some common mental illness (anxiety, mood, somatoform disorders and schizophrenia from a cultural perspective
  • Culture bound syndromes, cultural validations and their possible links with mental illness in the classification manuals
  • Acculturation, multiculturalism and mental health
  • Cross-cultural and multicultural psychotherapy: Help-seeking behaviour, treatment and prognosis

Number of weeks:
2 week (1 week face-to-face contact): 1 week self study

Learning Outcomes

At the end of the module the student should be able to

  • describe and identify the role of cultural variables in the aetiology of mental disorder.
  • explain how cultural variables interact with biological, psychological and environmental variables to influence psychopathology.
  • appraise cultural variations in standards of normality and abnormality.
  • critically evaluate cultural variations in the classification and diagnosis of psychopathology.
  • describe and determine the cultural variations in the expression, course and outcome of psychopathology, and
  • assess how cultural change affects adaptation outcome?

 

Pre-requirements

Students admitted to a Masters degree Programme may join this course (e.g. TropEd Europe network).
Proficiency in English at a level corresponding to TOEFL 550 or IELTS band 6.0 is expected.
Physicians and dentists specialising in public health, general practitioners and other health workers with special interest in culture and psychopathology.

Recommended previous knowledge

Even though previous knowledge of psychology (clinical, or cross-cultural), anthropology (medical) will be very helpful they are not pre-requisites to the course.

Teaching Methods

The course will involve formal lectures, interactive group discussions. Otherwise, the students will do a lot of reading and self-reflection on mental disorders from their own society, as well as discuss and interview people from other cultures how mental disorders are defined, identified and treated in their particular society.

At the end of each day's lecture, students will be given a home work. Each home work will involve about 4 - 5 hours of work (reading) and the submission of a written essay of about 500 words. Ideally, the essay should be submitted by noon of the following day. All the essays should have been submitted by the last day of lectures. During the 2nd week of the course, students will be expected to do self-study. This self-study will result in a self defined reading objective where the student has to write an annotated summary of ca 5-10 articles. This would be 2500 words. In addition, the students will be required to choose one of 4 assigned essay topics, and write ca 2500 word essay. The annotated report and the essay both are due after the self-study period. The exact date will be announced at the start of the course.

Assessment methods

Continuous assessments involving the short (up to 500 words) and long (up to 2500 words) essays to be written at home.

Grading Scale

In all students have to submit 5 different assignments:
(i) A report (i.e., an annotated summary) of self-defined reading. This will be about 2500 words)
(ii) 3 short ones essays (ca 500 words in length), based on the daily home work during the first week of the course: and
(iii) An essay (ca 2500 words) to be submitted after the self study.
The 3 short essays will form 30 % of the final grade, 10% for each essay): The two assignments after the self-study period (i.e., the annotated summary and 4th essay) will respectively account for 40%.and 30% of the final grade.
A student who does not submit at least 2 of the 3 short essays will automatically fail. Similarly, failure to submit any of the two assignments from the self-study (i.e., the annotated summary and the essay) will automatically fail. Essays will be graded using letter grading ranging from A-F, where A = Excellent? and F = Fail. All essays should be submitted online through MY SPACE
NB: There will be no school exam.

Reading List

Suggested reading (This will regularly be revised)

There are 2 main textbooks to the course, 2 desk reference books, and a number of selected articles and book chapters.

Textbooks

  1. Bhugra, D., & Bhui, K (eds). (2007). Textbook of cultural psychiatry. Chapters 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 16, 17, 24, 26 - 33; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  2. Tseng, W-S (2001). Handbook of cultural psychiatry. Chapters 9 - 11, 13, 14, 15 - 19, 31 32 San Diego: Academic Press.

Desk reference books

  1. American Psychiatric Association (2000). Diagnostic manual and statistical manual of mental disorders 4th edition, Text revised (DSM-IV-TR). Washington: APA.
  2. World Health Organization (1990). International classification of diseases- 10 for the classification of mental and behavioural disorders. Geneva: World Health Organization http://www.who.int/classifications/icd/en/bluebook.pdf

Selected articles and book chapters.

  • Berry, J. W., Poortinga, Sam, D. L.,. Breugelmans, S. M., & . Chasiotis, A (in press). l Cross-cultural psychology: Research and application. (Chapters 14 - Acculturation: Chapter 17 - health)). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Bhugra, D & Mastrogianni, A. (2004). Globalization and mental disorders. An overview in relation to depression. British Journal of Psychiatry, 184, 10 - 20
  • Carter, J. H. (Guest Editor) (2004). Culture, race and ethnicity in psychiatric practice. Psychiatric Annals, vol 34, number 7. papers by
  1. Ruiz, P. Addressing culture, race and ethnicty in psychiatric practice (pp 527 - 532)
  2. Adebimpe, V. R. A second opinion on the use of white norms in psychiatric diagnosis of black patients (pp 542 - 551)
  3. Clark, M. O. Challenges and controversies of designing mental health treatment programs for blacks (pp 555-560)
  • Cuéllar. 1, & Paniagua, F. (2000.). Handbook of multicultural mental health. (Chapters 1, 2, & 7). London: Academic press.
  • Draguns, J. G. (1990). Normal and abnormal behaviour in cross-cultural perspective. Specifying the nature and their relationship. In J. J. Berman (ed.), Nebraska symposium on motivation. 1989: Cross-cultural perspectives. (pp. 235 - 277). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
  • Hare-Mustin, R. T. & Marecek, J. (1997). Abnormal and clinical psychology: The politics of madness. In D. Fox & I Prilleltensky (eds.).,Critical psychology: An introduction. (pp. 104-120). Thosand Oaks: Sage Publications
  • Kleinman, A. (2004). Cultue and depression. New England Journal of Medicine, 351, 951-953
  • MacLachlan, M (2002). Culture and health (Chapters 3, 4, 6 & 7). Chichester: John Wiley & Sons
  • Marsella, A. J. (2003). Cultural aspects of depressive experience and disorders.. In W. J. Lonner, D. L. Dinnel, S. A. Hayes, & D. N. Sattler (Eds.), Online Readings in Psychology and Culture (Unit 9, Chapter 4), (http://www.wwu.edu/~culture), Center for Cross-Cultural Research, Western Washington University, Bellingham, Washington USA.
  • Prince, M., Patel, V., Saxena, S., Maj, M., Maselko, J., Phillips, M. Rahman, A (2007). No health without mental health The Lancet, Volume 370, Issue 9590, Pages
  • Ryder, A. G., Yang, J., & Heini, S. (2002). Somatization vs. psychologization of emotional distress: A paradigmatic example for cultural psychopathology. In W. J. Lonner, D. L. Dinnel, S. A. Hayes, & D. N. Sattler (Eds.), Online Readings in Psychology and Culture (Unit 9, Chapter 3), (http://www.wwu.edu/~culture), Center for Cross-Cultural Research, Western Washington University, Bellingham, Washington USA.
  • Sam, D. L., & Moreira, V. (2002). The mutual embeddedness of culture and mental illness. In W. J. Lonner, D. L. Dinnel, S. A. Hayes, & D. N. Sattler (Eds.), Online Readings in Psychology and Culture (Unit 9, Chapter 1), (http://www.wwu.edu/~culture), Center for Cross-Cultural Research, Western Washington University, Bellingham, Washington USA.
  • WHO (2001). The world health Reaport. Mental health. Geneva: WHO. http://www.who.int/whr2001/2001/main/en/index.htm

859-877

Place of Teaching

Centre for International Health

Contact Information

Centre for International Health

Tel.: +47 55588560; e-mail: studie.cih@uib.no