This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Reply to article  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Mitchell G. Weiss, PhD, MD
Department of Psychiatry The Cambridge Hospital 1493 Cambridge St Cambridge, MA 02139

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1982;39(11):1344.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

— In their article entitled "Measuring Nonspecific Psychological Distress and Other Dimensions of Psychopathology" (ARCHIVES 1981;38:1239-1247), Vernon and Roberts appropriately stated, "Available anthropological data illustrate the varied pattern of recognition of mental disorders, especially for the less severe psychoneurotic and psychophysiologic conditions" (p 1246).

However, a corollary is also valid: available anthropological data also illustrate similar patterns of recognition of mental disorders, especially of the more severe disorders. In her analysis of diverse non-Western groups-the Eskimos of northwestern Alaska and Yorubas of rural, tropical Nigeria-Murphy noted that "in widely different cultural and environmental situations sanity appears to be distinguished from insanity by cues that are very similar to those used in the Western world."¹ This attitude is implicitly assumed, if not explicitly stated, by the many efforts at cross-cultural psychiatric epidemiology, including those of the World Health Organization² and others cited by Vernon and Roberts. Notwithstanding the . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?