7. North America

• Published in: Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review and Newsletter
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publications 1967
• Subjects: eskimo*
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/136346156700400126; http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/136346156700400126

J. MURPHY with C. HUGHES and with A. LEIGHTON contributes two papers analyzing Alaskan Eskimo concepts of psychopathology and the applicability of psychophysiological test screening devices in non-Western cultures. In the second paper, responses of Alaskan Eskimos and of eastern Canadians to a twenty-question 'Health Opinion Survey' are compared. Mental disturbance in a community of Canadian Eskimos has been studied by F. VALLEE in terms of religious belief system and paranoid type thinking of the patients, and in terms of community reaction to the mentally ill. D. STOKER discusses differences in symptom distributions between matched groups of Anglo-American and Spanish-American girls undergoing psychotherapy at child guidance clinics in the southwestern United States. Special emphasis is placed on the cultural background of depressive features. A. LEIGHTON has proposed the hypothesis that sociocultural disintegration produces psychopathological reactions. In S. PARKER and T. SASAKI'S paper, this hypothesis is tested for two communities experiencing social disintegration—one of Navaho Indians and the other of eastern Canadians. From Texas comes an account by A. RUBEL of the social life of Mexican-Americans and of those characteristics of their belief and social system underlying their pronounced tendencies to develop states of anxiety and disaffection for which they do not seek medical relief. The intensity and prevalence of folk beliefs about illness and the utilization of folk treatments is the subject of C. MARTINEZ and H. MARTIN'S enquiry among urban Mexican- Americans. Finally, H. B. M. MURPHY and M. LEMIEUX examine the signifi cance of the relatively high rates of schizophrenic disorders found among unmarried rural French-Canadian women in their twenties and married women of similar background who are above thirty-five years of age.