Role Of Culture In Psychopathology

The definition of culture itself is indicative of its role in psychopathology.
According to Matsumoto (2003), culture is a dynamic system of rules, explicit and implicit, established by groups in order to ensure their survival, involving attitudes, values, beliefs, norms and behaviours, shared by a group but harboured differently by each specific unit within the group, communicated across generations, relatively stable but with the potential to change across time.
If one closely inspects this definition, one would come to a realization that, all the four D’s of abnormality namely deviance, dysfunctional, distress and dangerous; are to an extent a manifestation of the culture of an individual. In defining abnormal behaviour, deviance or statistical

According to cultural relativism, abnormal behaviour can only be understood within the cultural framework within which it occurs while cultural universalism suggests that although culture does play an important role in determining the exact behavioural and contextual manifestations of abnormal behaviour, there exist cross-cultural similarities and/or universalities in the underlying psychological mechanisms and subjective experiences of various psychological

For instance, physical abuse of women especially by their husbands in condoned by the Indian society causing further erosion of their already brittle self-esteem (Dutt and Noble, 1982; Kumar, Gupta and Abraham, 2002; Rao, 1997). The death of a husband or child has been found to be linked with higher levels of psychological morbidity among women. This could be due to the fact that the identity of women is not independent but linked to that of their fathers, brothers, husbands, or sons; and therefore losing a male member in the family not only means loss of a loved one, but it is also accompanied with identity crisis, social stigma or in worst cases social outcast (Das, 1994; Malik et al, 1992; Naeem, 1992; Scheper-Hughes, 1987). Further, in a patriarchal society such as ours, there is constant pressure and demands on a woman to give birth to a male child. The woman therefore would be blamed and made to feel guilty if she gives birth to girls only. She could face a loss of status, threat of replacement by another woman, etc. which would give rise to anxiety, fear and shame. Divorce is also looked upon as a taboo, and is looked upon as objectionable. Numerous other risk factors for poor