Race and culture in psychiatry

Abstract

Psychiatry is a discipline that came into being in tandem with clinical psychology following the cultural changes in Western Europe of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries generally referred to as ‘The Enlightenment’. This chapter describes the meanings of the terms culture, race and ethnicity as used today in the field of mental health and the background of psychiatry and clinical psychology, that currently underpin mental health services and how psychiatry is currently practiced in the West. It also describes recent critiques of psychiatry that have emerged; before making some concluding remarks on the place of race and culture in psychiatric system in the future. The discourse on culture that is applicable to psychiatry mainly concerns the culture of the individual because emphasis on the individual – a characteristic of Western thinking – dominates psychiatry and psychology.