ABSTRACT
One literature review identified no less than eleven ways that culture conditions the expression of mental illnesses. There are cultural influences on physical health that can have mental health consequences, as when a culturally determined diet causes vitamin deficiency or malnutrition, affecting the nervous system. When scientists consider culture and mental illness together they usually intend to show how culture contributes to variations in the types and frequencies of mental illnesses. Culture itself may inherently cause some amount of mental illness, since cultures everywhere regulate human urges and channel, if not repress, human sexual and aggressive impulses. From a cultural perspective, moving mentally ill persons from asylums to state hospitals do not reflect a significant alteration of attitudes toward the people because the belief persisted that can decide that some others are different and therefore deserve to be treated differently.
