ABSTRACT
In everyday discourse it is common to point out someone’s behaviour and declare it unusual, weird, abnormal. However, psychologists are rather more cautious about labelling behaviour ‘abnormal’. Traditionally they have struggled to establish workable criteria against which to judge behaviour as normal, abnormal or pathological. Abnormality might however be equated with deviation from the statistical norm. There is arguably a culture-bound element to all abnormal syndromes. Psychology has tended to approach the culture-bound syndromes from two theoretical directions. The universalist approach regards these syndromes through the eyes of North American and European based (western) psychiatry, often reserving the term ‘exotic’ to refer to them. Symptoms are compared with those of disorders that are traditionally diagnosed by western clinicians.
