The pathoplastic effect of culture on psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia

Contemporary psychiatry attempts to clarify etiological and pathogenetic aspects of a number of suspected “biological” disorders, like severe affective disorders and schizophrenia, primarily by means of biomedical methods. But there are phenomena like contents of delusions which cannot be easily explained by biological or allied socio-medical sciences. Although it is generally accepted knowledge that prevalence and shape of certain psychotic phenomena are influenced by cultural patterns, the degree of the pathoplasticity of these symptoms is yet unknown. Based on data of the International Study on Psychotic Symptoms (ISPS) including 1080 subjects from Austria, Poland, Lithuania, Georgia, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Ghana we tried to estimate the culture-sensitive variance of contents of delusions, hallucinations and first rank symptoms. We found rates between 15% and 40% by means of canonical discriminant analysis. Our results confirm cultural psychiatry as an important tool for the understanding and consequently for the treatment of patients with major mental disorders.