Cultural Aspects of Trauma

Cultural Psychology and Anthropology

Anthropologists and cultural psychologists and psychiatrists have long refuted Western notions and conceptualizations of self-prevalent in psychiatry and psychology. They have argued that psychology has used a reductionistic approach by treating culture as subordinate to universal laws of human behavior. This perspective has long promoted the notion that individuals are deeply embedded in social contexts, thus introducing cultural notions of mental health in the field such as the idioms of distress (e.g., Arthur Kleinman, Clifford Geertz, Byron Good, Hazel Rose Markus, Shinobu Kitayama, Michelle Rosaldo, and Richard Shweder). Some anthropologists suggest that rather than speaking of a psychology of emotions, we should talk about an anthropology of emotions because of the inescapable link between emotions and culture.

Arthur Kleinman's classic text Rethinking Psychiatry was a call to the mental health profession to address culture in a more integrative way. It brought attention to the different explanatory belief models, advocating an idiographic approach to understand mental illness.

In the 1990s, the field of trauma experienced a rapid growth on the knowledge around the eth-nocultural aspects of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (e.g., Anthony Marsella, Yael Danieli, Beth Hudnall Stamm, among others). There was a significant amount of scholarship developed around non-European groups, consistent with the prevalent notion that culture is only about “ethnocultural” groups. It was recognized that appreciating cultural differences in trauma response is a necessary component of trauma assessment and treatment.

The development of the diagnosis of PTSD in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) was very controversial among cultural psychologists and psychiatrists and some groups involved in international disaster work. Some even questioned the cross-cultural application of the PTSD diagnosis to non-Western groups, since culture mediates the ways people cope with trauma. Such diagnosis was seen as an attempt to apply Western epistemological and methodological notions as universally valid knowledge.

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