Why Do Culture-Syndromes Matter?
Biology and culture cannot be easily separated and we should take this seriously
Lets take two unrelated facts: 1) pain medication is often white, because patients associate white with pain relief and white coloured placebo pills are more effective at combating pain than other coloured medications, 2) thousands of Indian men report suffering from a condition called ‘Dhat syndrome’, where young men believe their vital energies are being sapped through loss of semen, causing guilt, insomnia, heart palpitations and anxiety amongst other symptoms. What connects these two things? The idea that the human body is open to culture in a way that directly changes physiology.
I have a particular interest in culture-syndromes, these strange symptoms and medical problems which only emerge within particular groups of people. I believe they show, along with the placebo effect, that nature and culture develop together - particularly through the cultural power of suggestion, habituation, expectation and association.
Culture-bound syndromes were not discussed in the literature as a separate phenomenon until the 1950’s and 60’s. The work of Pow Meng Yap, a professor of psychiatry from Hong-Kong, was instrumental to the concept that certain mental disorders arose within particular cultural groups and settings: “rare, exotic unpredictable and chaotic behaviors at their core among uncivilized people”, these included koro and latah. I have discussed a few examples in my writings, including Hmong sudden nocturnal deaths and the French psychiatric idea of bouffée délirante - described as an acute psychotic disorder, characterised by:
an acute, brief nonorganic psychosis that typically presents with a sudden onset of fully formed, thematically variable delusions and hallucinations against a background of some degree of clouding of consciousness, unstable and fluctuating affect, and spontaneous recovery with some probability of relapse
I’ve also written about cultural beliefs such as having sexual intercourse with ‘spirit-spouses’ or ‘shaman-spouses’, as well as mass panics of being sexually assaulted by spirit creatures while asleep. To me these all have in common that a person raised within a particular culture can expect certain things to happen, even if they make no sense to others.
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