[9] In his book Handbook of Cultural Psychiatry, Wen-Shing Tseng provides the following example adapted from Foulks:[10] Mrs. A is a 30-year-old woman who has had periodic episodes of "strange experiences" in the past 3 years (since her mother's death).
Two years ago, she had her second attack, which lasted about half an hour, during which time she ran from her home into the snow, tearing off her clothing.Although there is no known cause for piblokto, Western scientists have attributed the disorder to the lack of sun, the extreme cold, and the desolate state of most villages in the region.
[12][13] The native Inughuit diet or Eskimo nutrition provides rich sources of vitamin A through the ingestion of livers, kidneys, and fat of arctic fish and mammals and is possibly the cause or a causative factor.
[14] The ingestion of organ meats, particularly the livers of some Arctic mammals, such as the polar bear and bearded seal, in whom the vitamin is stored at levels toxic to humans, can be fatal to most people.
Dick examined the original records of the European Arctic explorers, and ethnographic and linguistic reports on Inughuit societies, and discovered that not only is the majority of academic speculation into piblokto based on reports of only eight cases, but the word "piblokto" / "pibloktoq" does not exist within Inuktun (the Inughuit language); possibly, Dick concluded, this may have been the result of errors in phonetic transcription.
In a 1995 paper published in the journal Arctic Anthropology,[15] and in his 2001 book Muskox land: Ellesmere Island in the Age of Contact, Dick suggests that piblokto is a "phantom phenomenon", arising more from the Inuhuit reaction to European explorers in their midst.
[11] Similarly, Hughes and Simons have described piblokto as a "catch-all rubric under which explorers lumped various Inuhuit anxiety reactions, expressions of resistance to patriarchy or sexual coercion, and shamanistic practice".
For example, transcultural psychiatry scholar Laurence Kirmayer writes: Most comprehensive psychiatric texts mention pibloktoq as a culture-bound syndrome characterized by sudden wild and erratic behaviour.
It seems that psychiatric case description transformed a situation of sexual exploitation of Inuit women by explorers into a discrete disorder worthy of a new diagnostic label.