Self report ratings of psychopathology in Korean and Jamaican women

Women from different nations with different customs may express varying levels of psychological distress and present problems in forms their societies accept. We compared women from Korea and Jamaica where women's roles and behaviour differ, and may influence the types of symptoms they display. Korean culture supports women's dependence, submissiveness, and obedience toward male partners and discourages women from expressing feelings, a custom that causes women distress which is usually expressed as anxiety related disorders. Jamaican women comprise most Jamaica's work force and are described as independent, outwardly expressive, and unlike Korean women may externalize their psychological distress. We tested these hypotheses using the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI), a multidimensional psychopathology measure, to survey Korean (N = 214) and Jamaican women (N = 282). Using age and nationality as predictors and total score and the nine BSI scales as criterion variables considered separately, multiple regression analyses reveal significantly higher scores on total problems and on all the paranoid scales scores on total problems and on all the paranoid scale scores for Korean than for Jamaica women. Large effect on the Somatization and Obsessive Complusive scales and a medium effect on the anxiety scale indicate that while Korean women generally expressed much more distress than Jamaica women, they are particularly vulnerable for the development of anxiety related problems(AU)

Psychiatry in Jamaica: growth and development

The history of psychiatry in the Caribbean island of Jamaica is presented based on ethnohistoriographic accounts of large group meetings of patients and staff of the Bellevue State Mental Hospital in the late 1970s. The development of psychiatric services is described from pre-colonial days of the indigenous Arawak Indians. The existing mental hospital was established in 1862 by the British Colonial Government, and the Mental Hospital Act of 1873 created the system whereby the mentally ill was arrested for lunacy and incarcerated in the mental hospital by Magistrates order. The development of a Community Psychiatric Service and the establishment of a deinstitutionalization programme for the mental Hospital in the decade of the 1960s and 70s is described, and a review of private and public community services presently existing in the island is also described. A brief review of the existing literature on Jamaican psychopathology is presented, including a disscussion on schizophrenia in Afro-Caribbeans, other common psychiatric conditions, developments in psychotherapy in Jamaicans, and psychodynamic issues of cultural identity.(Summary).

From vice to madness: the semantics of naturalistic and personalistic understanding in Trinidadian local medicine

Whilst the common analytical distinction between `naturalistic' and `personalistic' paradigms of medical knowledge has some immediate heuristic value and may indeed closely resemble the explicit schema elaborated by informants, interpretation of the semantics of bush medicine and madness in creole Trinidad suggests that the two types of knowledge are not incompatible, nor mutually exclusive, nor distinct. The vices of ganja and rum use may be interpreted within the hot-cold classification of bush medicine but, like other vices and like the more `intrapersonal' categories of pressure, grinding, studiation and tabanka, they may be understood as leading to madness. A common idiom of opposition and catharsis unites them, providing a higher level of analytical generality manifest in a range of local social institutions, and one rooted in post-colonial Afro-Caribbean experience and ideology.(AU)