Somatization

Abstract

Somatization historically has referred to the physical presentation of psychological distress. Somatization has been an area of interest to anthropologists and cross‐cultural psychiatrists because of prior claims that somatization was more common in non‐Western cultural groups. However, some studies have suggested that somatic differences across cultural groups are overstated. Instead, somatic symptoms are a universal component of depression, present worldwide in both Western and non‐Western communities. One reason for differences across settings in rates of somatization may be variation in local health problems and access to biomedical diagnostic and treatment resources. Despite the number of studies that have addressed this issue when studying patient populations from Western cultures, less attention has been given to the issue of physical pathology presenting as psychiatric pathology in non‐Western samples. More recent cross‐cultural psychiatric approaches have advocated for addressing physical symptom presentation of psychiatric populations within the context of local healthy populations; understanding the influence of the local burden of physiological diseases on somatic presentation of mental illness; documenting how psychological idioms of distress may be linguistically translated as physical complaints; and placing somatic complaints within the context of cultural variation in concepts of mind–body.