PSY3032 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Beyondblue, Pol Pot, Cyberculture
21 Jun 2018
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Monday, 1 August 2016
Week 2 Indigenous and immigrant mental health
PSY3032
-Abnormal described as located just inside people’s heads neglects the fact that suffering is
situated in cultural, social and political contexts
-Broad overview: people categorise things (Culturally shaped)
-What is culture? such as Internet culture, music culture, dance culture, golf culture…
-Culture is not homogenous or static, most people are exposed to multiple cultures and multi-
layered
-Culture and subjective experience ~ Culture mediated how we see and experience the world
around us
-Eg. How we view colours ~ Himba colour experiment
•Race: A category of identity that is culturally defined on the basis of superficial physical criteria
(eg. Skin Colour)
•Ethnicity: A category of group identity that is culturally defined on the basis of socio-cultural,
linguistic, historical and geographical criteria
•ETHNOCENTRISM: Looking at the world, and making judgements about another
culture and people according to the values and standards of one's own culture.
•Using our culture as an universal yardstick to evaluate them and their culture
•Leads to rigid and irrational generalisation and (often unconscious) assumptions that
other culture are inferior
•Mono-culturalism of psychology
-Practices of psychology are based on assumptions that Western cultural values are
‘normal’, and other world views are ‘different’, ‘maladaptive’, ‘inappropriate’ etc
-According to Phillips,2003: Whiteness is not a skin colour, or individuals- it’s a collective
mindset
-Participation as tokenistic, rather than substantive equity
•Particularly pertinent in relation to refugee trauma
•Various rates of PTSD found in refugee populations ;
-4% in Vietnamese
-26.3% Bosnians and Croatians (lilijanaet al. 2008)
-13-63% in Sudanese (Peltzer, 1999; Meffertet al. 2010)
-66% in Iraqis (Regester, 2012)
-79-86% Cambodians
•Beyond Blue study found that PTSD was the most common mental disorder suffered by
Indigenous people in custody.
!1
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Monday, 1 August 2016
Issues with cross-cultural diagnosis of PTSD!
- Onus on the individual
-The pathologizing of suffering
-The meaning of symptoms
~ Issues with symptoms endorsement
~ Holocaust versus Sudanese conceptions of memory
-No considerations of collective experience
-‘Masks’ social and moral imperatives
-Colonializes experience
Important not to be extreme
-PTSD has a place to suggest that it doesn’t is exactly what we’ re working against
POWER AND POWER RELATIONS
!Unequal power relations –defining what is ‘normal’, causes and expressions of distress, healing, and
recovery.
!Also, keeps focus on the ‘Other’ as the problem, rather than structural and systemic issues –such as
racism, and institutional and systemic discrimination.
!Psychology (and medicine) has a history of (often unintentional but systemic) ethnocentric practices -
typically not recognising-cultural differences and being oblivious to one’s own cultural assumptions.
(egGould 1998 about studies of “race and intelligence”)
Susto
!2
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Abnormal described as located just inside people"s heads neglects the fact that suffering is situated in cultural, social and political contexts. Broad overview: people categorise things (culturally shaped) What is culture? such as internet culture, music culture, dance culture, golf culture . Culture is not homogenous or static, most people are exposed to multiple cultures and multi- layered. Culture and subjective experience ~ culture mediated how we see and experience the world around us. Practices of psychology are based on assumptions that western cultural values are. Normal", and other world views are different", maladaptive", inappropriate" etc. According to phillips,2003: whiteness is not a skin colour, or individuals- it"s a collective mindset. Participation as tokenistic, rather than substantive equity: particularly pertinent in relation to refugee trauma, various rates of ptsd found in refugee populations ; 79-86% cambodians: beyond blue study found that ptsd was the most common mental disorder suffered by.
