Explanatory Models for Psychiatric Illness

Explanatory models of illness: a study of within-culture variation.

The current studies explore causal models of heart attack and depression generated from American healers whom use distinct explanatory frameworks. Causal chains leading to two illnesses, heart attack and depression, were elicited from participant groups: registered nurses (RNs), energy healers, RN energy healers, and undergraduates. The domain-specificity hypothesis predicted that psycho-social...

ILLNESS EXPLANATORY MODELS IN CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH: A CRITIQUE OF THE EXPLANATORY MODEL INTERVIEW CATALOGUE by

Cultural dimensions of psychiatric diagnosis. A comparison of DSM-III-R and illness explanatory models in south India.

BACKGROUND Cross-cultural research to examine the cultural validity of diagnostic categories and underlying concepts requires methods that integrate epidemiological and anthropological frameworks. METHOD The Explanatory Model Interview Catalogue (EMIC) and Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R (SCID) were used to study 80 psychiatric out-patients with depressive neurosis at a clinic in ...

Explanatory Models for Mental Illness: Limitations and Dangers in a Global Context

This paper outlines a critique of Western biomedical theories of what is called mental illness, and presents an alternative way of responding to mental health problems in people from non-Western cultures. The critique, based on what has been called 'postpsychiatry', problematizes some of the key assumptions that underpin the theory and practice of psychiatry, particularly the problem of how it ...

Pessimistic explanatory style and response to illness.

Previous studies have shown that a pessimistic explanatory style is a risk factor for illness, but the factors linking explanatory style and illness are unknown. One's characteristic response to poor health may mediate this relationship. Perhaps pessimistic individuals act helplessly in the face of their symptoms, thereby exacerbating disease. In the present study, we investigated this possibil...