Anthropology Responding To Mental Health Issues

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The roles anthropology plays is that they responding to mental health issues is very crucial because they are the ones who can really observe, report , interpret and explain the world perspectives on mental illness. They can identify issues according to race, ethnicity, age, geography and socioeconomic status. Discovering this factor would allowed them to teach the world that every disease or mental illness isn’t the same. We see that depression exists universally, but the way it is understood, treated and experience is very different from culture to culture. For example it would be the preconceived ideas that all culture outside of the West believe depression is the same for every individual and the role of the anthropology is to remove …show more content…

We in the United States believes that medicine can heal everything; as in the other culture like the Hispanic culture believes in susto. According to the book, susto victims are those who suffer from,” loss of their souls feel tired and listless, have trouble sleeping, don’t care about their appearance, little appetite, and insomnia,” (235). Basically it occur when a certain event happen that causes the soul to leave the body. When the western culture looks at this they believe that people are just suffering from psychological distress. In sum, we don’t know how many people or culture believes in the Western health system, but we do know it is very prevalent. Such ideas and beliefs can hurt certain individuals because they don’t have the right resource to know what exactly is going on. Their culture may not speak about certain things but because social insecurity pushes theme to found better treatment they will look to the Western ideas about mental illness. This would lead to misdiagnosis of such mental treatment and factors. One would believe their illness is the same as another but soon realize they are not the

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