[Everything is relative...about the Hanoi Institute of Traditional Medicine].

At the Symposium entitled "Health, Culture, and Quality of Life" held in Hanoi in 1993, the authors of this report met the physicians in charge of the Traditional Medicine Institute of Hanoi which works with the World Health Organization for traditional medicine. After an historical overview of the foundation of this center providing research, care, and training under the auspices of the Hanoi School of Medicine, Professor Hoang Bao Chau described a practice based on revision of ancestral traditions in accordance with scientific methods, the resulting synthesis being up-to-date yet in keeping with heritage. This novel and pragmatic approach, which takes into account the complexity of man, offers an opportunity to reflect on the current status of medical practices in the world and on their adaptation to each population at a time when the experience of the Other seems almost impossible to communicate.

[Psychotic masked depression or black mask for depression].

We have used as depression criteria those of Pichot and Hassan, described during the Sint-Moritz Symposium in 1973 on masked depression. According to their clinical experience in Zaïre and Senegal, the authors consider the possibility that the "bouffée délirante" (acute psychotic reaction), frequent in black Africa, is in fact a manifestation of depression. They remind the five criterias of Pichot and Hassan, i.

[Use of a rating scale in transcultural psychiatry].

The Psychopharmacological Studies Group of Fann, Dakar, considered the cultural expression of mental illness as it would help for a new definition of the nosographic frames, and inside of them, the appreciation of symptoms. This new definition would be applied "universally" if it may be considered that some symptoms are "culture-free" and others deeply marked by the discourse held by the person or by his social group. The use of valuation scales for symptomatic change during a treatment (here anti-depressive one) become harder by the undifferenciation of these two types of symptoms.