Monday, November 12, 2012

Cross-cultural studies in psychopathology

"People at a given moment in history in need of expressing their psychological suffering have a limited number of symptoms to choose from - a symptom pool."

"When someone unconsciously latches onto a behavior in the symptom pool, he or she is doing so for a very specific reason: the person is taking troubling emotions and internal conflicts that are often indistinct and frustratingly beyond expression and distilling them into a symptom or behavior that is a culturally recognized signal of suffering."

"Patients unconsciously endeavor to produce symptoms that will correspond to the medical diagnostics of the time."

Implications?
The patient is unconsciously striving for recognition and legitimization of internal distress. Naming of disease in an official, public way makes for a perilous event.

"A victim processes a traumatic event as a function of what it means. This meaning is drawn from their society and culture and this shapes how they seek help and their expectation of recovery."
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