Mental Illness And Culture Essay

Mental illness is a condition that affects your mood, thinking, and behaviour in many ways. This includes anxiety, depression, and personality disorders. According to www.livescience.com, “Culture is the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, defined by everything from language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and arts.” In North American society people have many different views on what mental illness is. Many people believe that mental illness is a religious problem or not a real problem at all. However, others believe that mental illness is a psychological problem that requires medical assistance.
Our research is to find a correlation between mental illness and culture. We believe that culture does affect mental illness because some cultures view mental illness as a spiritual problem rather than medical. To test our hypothesis we surveyed 100 people ranging from various age groups. Our results show that many people do believe that mental illness is a real

Culture-bound syndrome is a folk illness that explains a certain type of behavior or misfortune. Www.psychiatrictimes.com used this exmple to explain culture-bound syndrome: “In certain parts of the Philippines, for example, when a person becomes ill in a number of very different ways (fever, stomachache, shouting during sleep, incessant crying, various skin ailments), it may be said that the individual is suffering from lanti. This is a way of saying that the presumed etiology of all of these complaints is having been shocked or startled some time before. There is no discrete lanti syndrome with either a specific experience of altered reality or any specific altered behavior. Instead, the illness label is used as an explanation for a variety of troubles.”
From our survey, 11% of people knew what culture-bound syndrome was. This demonstrates that not many people are aware of the mental issues of one’s