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| | Some comments and prospect for the developments in the new century | | 2005-2-22 0:47:23 ShanghaiTongji University,Medical School Pr.Zhao Xudong |  Some comments and prospect for the developments in the new century
1) Cross-cultural psychiatry in China has a very short history. It is now just in the beginning phase. The following efforts should be made further to overcome methodological deficits often seen in the last 20 years, and the range of research should be widened.
A. There are a lot of research reports about the comparisons among different nationalities, but many authors have failed to distinguish the differences between nationalities and the ones between town and country, and the problems deriving from inside of one culture and those resulting from outside the specific culture.
B. Most reports about cultural-bound psychopathological problems are descriptive, and very few articles have discussed such issues with psychological and cultural anthropological frameworks. In-depth, dynamic thinking is needed, if wed like to find meaningful connections among mental, behavioral and cultural processes.
C. The studies on ethnic groups should employ closer, more empathic observation. This means that the researchers should learn more from the anthropologists and the studied people to understand the observed cultures better from an inner perspective.
2) Based on the long history of Chinese culture and the colorful contemporary socio-cultural reality, cross-cultural psychiatry is a field where the Chinese colleagues can contribute much for the worlds psychiatry. As the economy develops, the Chinese psychiatrists will pay more and more attention to the relatively "soft" fields such as social psychiatry, cross-cultural psychiatry and psychotherapy accordingly, besides they try to catch up the achievements of biological psychiatry as the "main-stream" of psychiatry.
3) Many colleagues havent considered cultural psychiatry as "useful". They trust the power of biological measures too much, and they have no interest to understand and to communicate with their patients. As the new understanding of culture will be accepted by more and more professionals, the psychiatrists in China will treat their patients more and more holistic and humane, in order to overcome the deficits of biological psychiatry.
4) The Chinese government begins to know the importance of the results from culturally related researches. Some important theoretical and practical suggestions have been accepted by the policy-makers, e.g., to deal with troublesome folks healings, and to plan mental health service for ethnic groups.
We hope that cross-cultural psychiatry in China will become an explicit science from an implicit one, and play a more important role in the development of Chinese psychiatry as a whole.
(Edited by Shuping,Tan) | | [CLOSE] |
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Ministry of Health, (2003) No.013
ICP:No.040657