Emil Kraepelin's ideas on transcultural psychiatry.

CONCLUSION: Kraepelin assumed that illnesses with exterior causes depended on the type of stimulants widely used in a given culture. Since he found little evidence for progressive paralysis, he concluded that European brains were particularly prone to sequelae of syphilis. For endogenous psychoses he postulated differences in both symptoms and courses, depressions being rarer and milder, and ceasing sooner. By contrast, he found dementia praecox (mainly covered by the concept of schizophrenias later) to be the most prevalent mental illness in Java, explicitly different in form from that in Europe.
PMID: 26129818 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

Source: Australasian Psychiatry - June 30, 2015 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Steinberg H Tags: Australas Psychiatry Source Type: research