PSYC 3350 Chapter Notes - Chapter Article: Alexithymia, Neurasthenia, Sick Role
11 Dec 2016
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Document Summary
During the 1980s and 1990s, when surveys were conducted, many psychiatric patients in china were diagnosed with neurasthenia, which emphasizes somatic symptoms. A troubling omission in studies seeking to demonstrate chinese variation from an assumed western norm is a lack of comparison groups. Study 1 found that chinese students seeking counselling reported considerably more somatic symptoms on questionnaire as compared with a chinese student control group, which in turn reported more psychological symptoms. Study 2 found that a chinese student sample reported significantly fewer somatic symptoms compared with chinese-american and euro-american student samples, contrary to expectations. Somatic presentations were more common when patients lacked an ongoing relationship with a physician. Chinese respondents were somewhat more likely to endorse somatic symptoms but had a much stronger tendency to endorse fewer psychological symptoms. Found many patients in north america who presented exclusively somatic symptoms on spontaneous self-reports but who endorsed psychological symptoms when asked directly.
