Culture, stress and recovery from schizophrenia: lessons from the field for global mental health.
This cultural case study investigates one U.S. psychosocial rehabilitation organization's (Horizons) attempt to implement the recovery philosophy of the U.S. Recovery Movement and offers lessons from this local attempt that may inform global mental health care reform. Horizons' "recovery-oriented" initiatives unwittingly mobilized stressful North American discourses of valued citizenship. At times, efforts to "empower" people diagnosed with schizophrenia to become esteemed self-made citizens generated more stressful sociocultural conditions for people whose daily lives were typically remarkably stressful. A recovery-oriented mental health system must account for people diagnosed with schizophrenia's sensitivity to stress and offer consumers contextually relevant coping mechanisms. Any attempt to export U.S. mental health care practices to the rest of the world must acknowledge that (1) sociocultural conditions affect schizophrenia outcomes; (2) schizophrenia outcomes are already better in the developing world than in the United States; and (3) much of what leads to "better" outcomes in the developing world may rely on the availability of locally relevant techniques to address stress.
Myers
Neely Laurenzo
NL
Center for the Study of Complementary and Alternative Therapies, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22908-0782, USA. nal6f@virginia.edu
D019090:Case Management; D003156:Community Mental Health Services; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D003906:Developing Countries; D018166:Health Care Reform; D006801:Humans; D038622:Internationality; D010043:Outcome and Process Assessment, Health Care; D017060:Patient Satisfaction; D010379:Peer Group; D011209:Power, Psychological; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000208:ethnology* / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D012565:Schizophrenic Psychology; D012649:Self Concept; D012917:Social Adjustment; D013315:Stress, Psychological / Q000150:complications*; D014481:United States