Abstract
Transcultural data and problems of interest to psychiatry accumulate more and more rapidly. This section opens with a scholarly attempt by W. M. PFEIFFER to summarize and classify these data and problems from a nosological point of view. It is followed by J. POUILLON'S comparative study of the doctor- patient relationship from an anthropological angle. According to this author, this relationship is essentially a social relation which varies from society to society according to cultural beliefs regarding disease. He buttresses his view point by examples taken from the Dangaleat of Chad, the Ndembu of Zambia, the Azande of Sudan and Congo-Kinshasa, and some other societies. B. P. DOHRENWEND and B. S. DOHRENWEND, in an attempt to test the role of social selection and social stress as explanations of the inverse correlation between social status and mental disorder rates, systematically compared matched groups of different ethnic origin in Manhattan, New York (Jewish, Irish, Negro, Puerto Rican). However, because of the unexpected and confusing results obtained, they were led to reappraise their methodology and to acknowl edge the influence of some cultural factors. The next paper, by M. KRAMER, deals with the complex problem of developing comparable health statistics both on the national and international levels. Problems which arise include: guidelines for the development of basic statistical programs, systematic statis tics for the study of psychiatric facilities, classification of mental disorders, and tables of diagnostic distributions. The section closes with a highly technical paper by F. ENGELSMANN et al. These authors compare American, Czecho slovak, French, German, and Italian diagnostic profiles by means of the Overall- Gorham's Brief Psychiatric Scale and the distance analysis of diagnostic patterns in an effort to contribute to the international diagnosis of functional psychoses.
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