Non-biological effects in the presentation of mental illnesses

This is a really interesting article. I'm surprised I didn't put it on
my blog earlier.
vhttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html

There's lots of examples of extraordinary cultural effects on mental
illness. The most interesting in my opinion is the change in the
presentation of anorexia in Hong Kong. The story (and the author's book)
report on a woman who dropped dead in the street. The media found out
she had a diagnosis of anorexia so they checked to find what this new
word meant. The checked the Westernised classifications - DSM and ICD -
for the cluster of symptoms to report the story.

Before this incident there were very few cases of people presenting with
the cluster of symptoms of anorexia but they were still given the
diagnosis because local psychiatrists saw how it presented differently.
The extraordinary thing is that after the media story the presentation
of the illness changed and more people began presenting with the Western
symptoms.

This is an interesting paper on the effect of exposure to television
vhttp://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/180/6/509?maxtoshow=&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=fiji&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT
<http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/180/6/509?maxtoshow=&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=fiji&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT>

The authors went to a Fijian island just before the population started
buying televisions. When they surveyed attitudes to eating problems and
body image they found very little prevalence of either of those but
after the introduction of TV they came back and found an increased level
of disorders.

What the authors didn't note is the effect of their research. Western
scientists with all the trappings of modernity (mobile phones, laptops,
brand labelled clothing) appear on an island and chat to the young
girls. They ask questions that may never have been asked before, like
how they felt about their body image compared to their peers. The effect
they observed may be because of the introduction of television to their
culture but it may also be because of the research the conducted, and by
doingso they introduced a Western mental illness to a mental
illness-naive community.

There are many other examples of how supposed biological illnesses
present differently. It's well observed that the levels of disability
vary from country to country.