Race, culture and psychiatry: a history of transcultural psychiatry

Abstract

The term 'transcultural psychiatry' has encompassed changing notions of race, culture and psychiatry and, as a result, it is a difficult concept to define. For a long time psychiatrists and social scientists have been commenting on how the psyches and psychiatric illnesses differ in non-White populations. However, transcultural psychiatry was not created as a distinct discipline until after World War II. This article will attempt to tell the story of transcultural psychiatry, charting its genesis in the aftermath of World War II, and then go on to describe how it has taken different forms in response to developments within psychiatry and wider sociocultural changes.

Transcending transculturalism? Race, ethnicity and health‐care

“…Transcultural theory is particularly dominant in nursing, and this is the discourse that is primarily addressed in this paper. Nevertheless, many medical texts and those relating to other ‘professions allied to medicine’ display a similar theoretical stance (Qureshi 1994; Hayles and Adu 2004; Bains 2005) and the critique that is advanced here can also be applied to accounts of transcultural healthcare practice more generally.…”

At the crossroads of anthropology and epidemiology: Current research in cultural psychiatry in the UK

“…The importance of developing appropriate research tools, such as scales and questionnaires that were culturally valid was emphasized. Cultural psychiatrists also lobbied for more resources to be devoted to the mental health problems of ethnic minorities (Bains, 2005). …”

Ethnographies of new clinical encounters: immigrant’s emotional struggles and transcultural psychiatry in Portugal

“…Transcultural psychiatry to the psychiatrists emphasized the universal nature of disease entities. Transcultural psychiatry to the anthropologists emphasized the importance of understanding mental illness in the terms of the patient's cultural context and personal history, and examining, at the same time, the "culture" of psychiatry itself (Bains 2005). As a consequence of this confrontation, psychiatrists assumed more radically post-analytic and neoKraepelinian positions, and anthropologists became "too antipsychiatrists" (Estroff 1971).…”