Symptomatology of minor psychiatric morbidity: a crosscultural comparison.
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.
Cheng
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TA
Department of Psychiatry, National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei, ROC.
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001008:Anxiety Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D003866:Depressive Disorder / Q000175:diagnosis; D004739:England; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000523:psychology; D009497:Neurotic Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis; D013001:Somatoform Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis; D013624:Taiwan