ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the cross-cultural psychology literature, with its focus on anxiety states rather than discrete pathological forms. It considers the most important cross-cultural epidemiological studies of anxiety disorders, including both those that have measured levels of anxiety symptoms in populations and those that have identified specific anxiety disorders and measured their prevalence. The chapter reviews the literature that focuses on “emic” illness categories—categories held by members of a society itself, including the so-called culture-bound disorders—and address the issue of how these are related to Western diagnostic categories. Critical comparisons of diagnostic practice of American and European psychiatrists revealed extraordinary problems with reliability. For psychiatrists working in non-Western cultures, difficulties of using Western diagnostic criteria in a reliable manner had long been recognized. Neurasthenia continues to be an important diagnosis in the non-Western world because it maps a “real” phenomenon and is more culturally appropriate in those settings than the term “depression” or “anxiety".
