Schizophrenia here is different than schizophrenia there — why?

a post by Matt Davis for the Big Think blog

Most diseases don't differ depending on where you're from. Schizophrenia, however, is heavily dependent on your culture.

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• Since schizophrenia is a disease of the mind, the cultural context it occurs in can have a serious impact on how it manifests.
• Cultures in which the family is more important will have delusions centered around their family, cultures in which religion is important often have religious delusions, and so on.
• This growing understanding of the cultural sensitivity of schizophrenia highlights how much our identities are dependent on the cultures we grow up in.

Whether you're in North America, China, or the Antarctic, if you're diagnosed with diabetes, it's the same kind of diabetes. If you get lung cancer, it's not going to be a different kind of lung cancer just because you live in India. But schizophrenia can take wildly different forms depending on whether you're from Europe, Japan, Pakistan, or any other place on Earth.

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