Mental Health and Culture: Some Vignettes

Abstract

I would like to share with you some personal experiences accumulated in the course of several years of professional activity. Most are associated with the clinical and epidemiological aspects of mental disorders. I will do this rather than embark upon a formal presentation of a subject which has been extensively studied in previous publications, symposia, seminars and even whole congresses (Mead, 1959; Soddy and Ahrenfeldy, 1967; Dunham, 1976). Most of what I intend to tell you cannot be treated as “scientific” findings determined by theory, method and systematic research. It will rather be a narrative based upon glimpses, impressions and nuances of culture as woven into the fabric of mental health or illness. In one of his essays, Lewis Thomas (Thomas, 1981) refers to things “that human beings can only see out of the corner of the eye”, which is a gift, he says, familiar to all children. Even though the following material was elicited in a clinical context, all the while the peripheral vision glanced, almost inadvertently, at certain complementary images, which in a subtle way contributed to color and shape the experience into a meaningful whole.