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Update: Schizophrenia Across Cultures

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Abstract

The incidence of schizophrenia, as well as the symptoms, course, and outcomes for people so diagnosed seem to vary across some cultural contexts. The mechanisms by which cultural variations may protect one from or increase one’s risk of developing schizophrenia remain unclear. Recent findings from transdisciplinary cross-cultural research, indicate ways that we may better understand how socioenvironmental and cultural variables interact with physiologic pathways relating psychosocial stress and psychotic symptoms, epigenetic changes, and people’s use of culturally available tools to mitigate stress, in ways that may inform relevant, effective interventions for people diagnosed with psychotic disorders worldwide.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Steven Siegel, Kim Hopper, Tanya Luhrmann, and Constantin Tranulis for their comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. The project described was supported by grant no. 5-T32-AT000052 from the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the official views of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

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No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.

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  1. Center for the Study of Complementary and Alternative Therapies, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, 22908, USA

    Neely Laurenzo Myers

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Correspondence to Neely Laurenzo Myers.

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Myers, N.L. Update: Schizophrenia Across Cultures. Curr Psychiatry Rep 13, 305–311 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11920-011-0208-0

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