“This House Believes That the Concept of Culture Has Outlived Its Usefulness for Psychiatry”: What...??

摘要

To be sure, the debate kept an expected scholarly level. The moderator opened it up by invoking the philosophical saying that to improve knowledge and thinking “it is better to argue against your own inclinations.” He enumerated the “varied and profound” connections between culture and mental health, but also outlined “misleading” cultural concepts such as ethnicity, geographic locality, international links, social sciences’ definitions, symbols, and languages that become “trees inside the forest” and create neglectful reifications and ambiguous homogeneities. The first advocate of the notion that culture has “outlived” its usefulness alluded to the changing nature of the concept and its content, to discrepancies regarding cultural explanations, interpretations, and the “social acquisition” process of meanings and clinical responses. One of the most interesting arguments of this position was that people’s beliefs are useful to identify views about mental health problems, but such views emerge mostly out of “political” considerations in such a way that any psychiatric intervention along those lines may be “detrimental.”