Symptomatology of minor psychiatric morbidity: a crosscultural comparison

Abstract

The basic symptoms of minor psychiatric morbidity (MPM) reported elsewhere were also found in a community survey in Taiwan. However, differences in the patterns of and manifestations of the symptoms were evident. Contrary to most Western surveys, the prevalence of anxiety (24.7%) was found to be higher than that of depression (8.3%) in Taiwan. Possible explanations based on sociocultural characteristics of the Chinese family were proposed. The notion of somatization as a predominant symptom in Chinese neurotic patients advocated by some research workers was not supported in this study. As a result of findings in community cases, it is argued that the importance of somatization has been considerably overemphasized as a factor in the illness behaviour of neurotic cases in Chinese and other cultures, and it is therefore not a culture-specific disease phenomenon. It is also suggested that certain culture-specific neurotic syndromes reported in Chinese, such as shen-ching-shuai-jo (neurasthenia) and shen-k'uei (semen loss syndrome), are clinically equivalent to MPM. Implications of the present findings on crosscultural research and management of MPM were discussed.