title: The peripatetic cultural psychiatrist: reflections on a forty-five year longitudinal study of a South India village.
abstract: This article presents one woman's odyssey, which began with a career in linguistics and later incorporated cultural psychiatry. While engaged in fieldwork as a linguist, studying the syntactic structure of Havyaka Kannada and dialectal accommodation among the castes in a South India village, I developed language skills and rapport with the village residents. Then I transferred my community-wide rapport to research on depression as a cultural psychiatrist. The articles I wrote on depression and its relationship to socialized passivity and endorsed assertiveness in progressive generations of South Indian women, illustrate the impact of change on mental health. The cultural background from my community-based longitudinal study of more than forty-five years has contributed to my understanding disorders in Indian patients living in a globalized world.
authors.affiliation: Tulane University Medical Center, New Orleans, LA 70130, USA. hullrich@tulane.edu
authors.forename: Helen E
authors.initials: HE
authors.lastname: Ullrich
mesh_terms: D000883:Anthropology; D002321:Career Choice; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D018864:Cultural Diversity; D003866:Depressive Disorder / Q000208:ethnology / Q000523:psychology; D003906:Developing Countries; D005008:Ethnopsychology / Q000639:trends; D005260:Female; D005544:Forecasting; D005783:Gender Identity; D006301:Health Services Needs and Demand / Q000639:trends; D006608:Hierarchy, Social; D006801:Humans; D007194:India; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D012106:Research; D012922:Social Change; D012945:Social Values; D013140:Spiritualism