Conceptualizing Cross-Cultural Psychotherapy
Challenges and Theories
Humans share numerous similarities in their emotions, but mental disorders appear to be substantially shaped by cultural context. Cultural Psychology presents hikikomori, acute social withdrawal, as a uniquely Japanese phenomenon. Though similar to disorders like agoraphobia, hikikomori appears to be outside the categories of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), complicating treatment protocols (Heine, 2020). Therefore, conditions like hikikomori significantly impact both cross-cultural psychology and psychotherapy.
One may be tempted to compare hikikomori to ostensibly similar disorders, but such conflations could have disastrous effects (Heine, 2020). Analogously, ADHD and anxiety disorders have relatively similar symptomologies; however, pharmaceutically, both conditions are treated in dramatically different ways. ADHD is typically treated with a stimulant, which would be disastrous to a person with an anxiety disorder. One encounters similar issues in retrospective diagnoses of historical figures, which often grant a privileged position to modern diagnostic categories (Siena, 2005). For example, commentators have attempted to impose modern diagnoses like Major Depressive Disorder or Generalized Anxiety Disorder onto ancient Assyrian medical texts, which had relatively…
