Abstract
This paper extends work presented earlier (Gaines 1979b) on the relation of psychiatric actors’ definitions of mental illness, seen as folk theories, to professional behavior. A summary of earlier work sees American psychiatry as ethno-psychiatry and examines the role of cultural assumptions in psychiatric theory and emergency room practice. The paper then shows how actors’ definitions affect not only cognitive behaviors such as diagnosis, but also the temporal dimension of interaction with patients themselves. It is shown that differences in etiological definitions affect the length of time a resident spends with a patient before making a disposition. The next section of this paper does two things: First, it suggests that it is useful and possible to distinguish two major “Great” cultural traditions in the West. For each tradition, aspects of world view are sketched. Second, two conceptions of person which correspond to the cultural traditions distinguished, the indexical and referential, are delineated. Lastly, some implications of these differing conceptualizations for psychiatric practice are presented with reference to case material considered in the second section of the paper.
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Gaines, A.D. (1982). Cultural Definitions, Behavior and the Person in American Psychiatry. In: Marsella, A.J., White, G.M. (eds) Cultural Conceptions of Mental Health and Therapy. Culture, Illness, and Healing, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9220-3_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9220-3_6
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