How important is culture for understanding the mind and mental disorders? I hear lots of brain talk these days -- "left brained vs. right brained" "a dopamine rush!" -- but I often wonder how important culture is for understanding these things. Does "human nature" (whatever we mean by that) change from one historical period to another?
A few historical factors have prompted me to ask this question. First, I've read that our concept of adolescence is not that old, and prior to European Romanticism, children were thought of as little adults, and we developed our concept of adolescence much later. In fact, the word "teenager" was coined in the English language sometime in the 1940s or so.
On mental disorder, I read that at different time periods, symptoms of mental illness have manifested themselves differently. In 1920s Cambodia (if that's the right decade), there was an outbreak of men who would murder their families for no reason and then suffer from amnesia.
Then I also read about some hunterer-and-gatherer society where people would kill themselves when they turned 30, although few would consider them mentally ill since everyone was doing it.
This is not an argument, but examples. I am not trying to sound polemical, but am asking out of a place of curiosity and ignorance. Oftentimes, I am kind of left wondering, have we forgotten how important culture is in studying the mind? How much do human beings change from one period to another? Why were there so many hysterical men and women in Freud's time but not today? What are we to make of the suicidal natives? Some part of me thinks it's important to reflect on these theoretical questions because of the culture wars we're going through right now -- between the Fathers and Sons, the new and the older ways of living. (Hopefully that phrase isn't too sexist. It's a reference to Turgenev's book!)
