ABSTRACT
Every worker in the mental health field should be trained to recognise the ways in which his own cultural upbringing is likely to have affected his perceptions of the problems which his clients bring, and to affect also the psychiatric vulnerability of those who share that cultural upbringing. Britain and France have easily distinguishable cultures as well as languages, but one can still classify them as both culturally European just as substantially different cultural groups can still be subsumed under the heading of African or Asian. In Britain itself, the local born exhibit, as one would expect, substantially lower rates of mental hospitalisation than most groups of immigrants, and that is not something to attribute to culture; but there are exceptions. Between 1930 and 1970 hospitalisation patterns among immigrants and their descendants did provide fairly convincing comparisons, starting with the work of Benjamin Malzberg in New York State.
