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Transcultural Psychiatry
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The Glossary of 'Culture-Bound Syndromes' in DSM-IV: A Critique

Charles C. Hughes

University of Utah

This paper presents an appraisal and critique of the attempt to include the culture-bound syndromes (CBS) in DSM-IV. DSM-IV's assumptions about the ontologic status of the CBSs are unacceptably fuzzy. The claim that the CBSs are'unique' or'specific to given a culture' is frivolous and should be relegated to an account of the developmental history of the concept of the CBS rather than included in the armamentarium of the diagnostician. Once cultural considerations are accepted as part of all diagnostic categories, it will no longer be necessary to group specific culturally determined behavior patterns into the disjunctive category'CBSs'. The CBSs are important not as a museum of exotic, static, bounded entities, but as illustrations of a generic way of thinking about relationships between psychopathology and cultural context.

Key Words: culture-bound syndromes • DSM-IV • idioms of distress • psychiatric nosology

Transcultural Psychiatry, Vol. 35, No. 3, 413-421 (1998)
DOI: 10.1177/136346159803500307
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