ABSTRACT
Among the writers on transcultural psychiatry, there are many who would wish to place the Western psychiatric diagnostic system at the same level as alternative lay or folk categorisation systems in other cultures. The intention of so doing would be to emphasise that DSM IV or ICD 10 are cultural products in the same way that local indigenous categorisation systems are in other societies. The perceived benefits are that we would become loosened from our commitment to the Western diagnostic system as having any particular priority, that we would be enabled to see psychiatric disorder as profoundly culturally influenced, embedded and sometimes created, and that we would cease from attempts to make quantitative epidemiological cross-cultural studies of mental disorders. Some recent examples of this approach are to be found in Nuckolls (1992) and Gaines (1992). The latter describes the DSMs as cultural constructions derived from Western ethnopsychology, and marshals a range of arguments to show that the concept of self in the DSMs is a Western one which can be clearly distinguished from alternative ethnopsychologies. The arguments used here are exactly the same as those examined in the last chapter.
