Cultural formulation guidelines.

The outline for the Cultural Formulation (CF) introduced in DSM-IV does not present any method for collecting the required cultural information. The absence of specific guidelines and illustrative cases has hampered its wider use. This article offers a practical approach to preparing a Cultural Formulation as a component of culturally competent clinical care.

How psychiatric conditions were made.

Information on the evolution of brain, culture, and adaptive behavior is discussed in order to explain why an amalgam of behavior and sickness, rather than "psyche" as ordinarily construed, constitutes the fabric which made up the psychiatric condition in evolving human groups. Limitations of the "harmful dysfunction" thesis and of related ideas of evolutionary psychologists about psychiatric condition are discussed. A hierarchical model of information-handling systems involved in brain and behavior relations is proposed as a way of better appreciating the importance of an integrative formulation of the psychiatric condition that incorporates visceral somatic disturbances and equates such conditions with sickness and maladaptation.

Why psychiatric conditions are special: an evolutionary and cross-cultural perspective.

In non-Western and premodern societies, approaches to sickness involved moral considerations laden with existential and spiritual implications. Healers and physicians had access to this aspect of their patient's lives, were expected to use it constructively, and often did so. The contemporary biomedical theory of disease no longer assigns to illness such metaphysical connotations.

Making sense of behavioral irregularities of great apes.

Psychopathology, mental illness, and psychiatric treatment are concepts relevant to modern medicine and medical psychology and replete with cumbersome intellectual and literary baggage. They bear the imprint of suppositions, world views, and general beliefs and values exemplified in the science, history, and general culture of Anglo European societies. The study in higher apes of phenomena addressed by such concepts raises conceptual dilemmas, usually termed speciesism and anthropomorphism, not unlike those encountered in comparative human studies of similar phenomena across cultures and historical periods, namely, ethnocentrism and anachronism.