Evolution of Cultural Perspectives on Mental Illness

Historical Perspectives on Mental Illness

Throughout history, mental illness has been viewed by most cultures across the world in a religious or spiritual context. Mental illness was misunderstood to be possession by the devil, spirit, or as a curse, or as an attack of sorcery or black magic; the mentally ill were at times mislabeled as witches. When the causes of mental illness were poorly understood, religious, magical, and mystical healings became very popular, with charms, talismans, and other delusive means. Holes were drilled in the head to release the evil spirits, and mentally ill people were burned to death in European countries during the medieval periods (Kemp & Williams, 1987). In Morocco, mental illness was thought to be “caught” like a cold. While walking casually, one might absent-mindedly step on a bit of sorcery on the path or accidentally drink it, thus “catching” a mental illness. In one sense, blaming evil takes the responsibility off the individual who is mentally ill as it implies that the victim is innocent and is not at fault for one’s condition. But on the other hand, it breeds fear of the individual who is ill as well as of the possibility of becoming afflicted similarly to the victim. The victims of mental illness were often ostracized, chained, or locked up in dungeons, which made their conditions worsen rather than improve.

Evolution of Cultural Perspectives on Mental Illness

The seventeenth century is known as the age of reason, and the eighteenth century as the age of enlightenment, as reason and scientific method came to replace faith and dogma to a great extent. The need to support assertions using scientific data and evidence was emphasized by scientists and philosophers. Such a scientific attitude towards mental disorders contributed to understanding mental illness scientifically and harbored increased compassion for the people who were suffering from mental illnesses. By the eighteenth century, “madness” began to be seen as beyond the control of the person. Because of this, thousands of mentally ill people confined to dungeons of daily torture were released to asylums where medical forms of treatment began to be investigated (Smith, 2005). Today, the medical model is the driving force in diagnosing and treating psychopathology. However, the global scenario is far from scientific in understanding mental illness. Today, in some African cultures, it is believed that while inattentively stepping on the substance of sorcery can cause mental illness (Asonibare, 1999). People belonging to Buddhism and some forms of Hinduism that adhere to the reincarnation and karma philosophy do believe that mental illnesses are caused by the wrongdoings in their previous births. Some of the Vietnamese who are not educated attribute a number of supernatural causes for mental illness, including possession by spirit, black magic, astrological misalignment, or Buddhist Karma philosophy (Nguyen, 2003). For the indigenous Cordillera people in the Philippines, besides a variety of causes of illness, malevolent spirits and witchcraft are the major causes of mental illness (Janetius, 2003).

The Role of Archetypal Psychology

The archetypal psychology of Carl Jung sheds light on this perplexing, poor culture-sensitive classroom phenomenon further. The archetypal patterns that are in our mind are part of the cognitive bases of human beings. These archetypal patterns in the human mind could be compared to a computer operating system on which education as software executes the functions. The inherited and modified archetypes, which reflect a person’s culture, are portrayed through mythology, religion, art, architecture, rituals, and social and traditional customs. On this operating system, education based on Western concepts could create a ‘program conflict’—a conflict between cognitive foundations and the input education. Therefore, a culture-sensitive classroom and local theory-based curriculum are important steps in planning and preparing an indigenous therapy model.

Challenges in Cross-Cultural Counseling

The Western counseling and therapy modules that are popularized all over the world today do not fit the needs of people from another culture. Therefore, an effective counselor and therapist should work in harmony with background influences of human conditions, specifically the tradition, life-world, environmental, and geographic conditions of the clients. In this context, psychologists and mental health professionals often talk about cross-cultural and culture-specific approaches in counseling. Cross-cultural psychology views culture simply as a site of variations for human behavior, whereas culture-specific psychology considers culture as the birthplace for psychological processes, an essential tool in therapy. Therefore, psychologists are becoming aware of cultural relativism and focusing increasingly on cultural contextualization in understanding and addressing human behavior and mental health issues. It is true that the diagnostic manual of mental disorders (DSM-5) that is widely used as a standardized tool of classification of mental sickness encourages clinicians to be culturally sensitive in their therapeutic approaches (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). One source of difficulty in cross-cultural counseling arises from the fact that the counselor and the client have different ethnic backgrounds. Ethnicity has by itself a stimulus value to both the counselor and the client, reflective of the existing relations in a given society. Another source of difficulty in cross-cultural counseling is that counseling is a product of Western civilization; therefore, a culture-specific approach, in the form of multicultural counseling, is highly recommended today (Sue & Sue, 2012).