[1] The early literature was associated with colonialism and with observations by asylum psychiatrists or anthropologists who tended to assume the universal applicability of Western psychiatric diagnostic categories.
An historical and politically informed perspective can counteract some of the risks related to promoting universalized 'global mental health' programs as well as the increasing hegemony of diagnostic categories such as PTSD (Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman analyze this issue in their book The Empire of Trauma).
[8] Roberto Beneduce, who devoted many years to research and clinical practice in West Africa (Mali, among the Dogon) and in Italy with migrants, strongly emphasizes this shift.
Inspired by the thought of Frantz Fanon, Beneduce points to forms of historical consciousness and selfhood as well as history-related suffering as central dimensions of a 'critical ethnopsychiatry' or 'critical transcultural psychiatry'.
In 1957, at the International Psychiatric Congress in Zurich, Wittkower organized a meeting that was attended by psychiatrists from 20 countries, including many who became major contributors to the field of cultural psychiatry: Tsung-Yi Lin (Taiwan), Thomas Lambo (Nigeria), Morris Carstairs (Britain), Carlos Alberto Seguin (Peru) and Pow-Meng Yap (Hong Kong).
The Foundation for Psychocultural Research at UCLA[12] has published an important volume on psychocultural aspects of trauma[13] and more recently landmark volumes entitled Formative Experiences: the Interaction of Caregiving, Culture, and Developmental Psychobiology edited by Carol Worthman, Paul Plotsky, Daniel Schechter and Constance Cummings,[14] Re-Visioning Psychiatry: Cultural Phenomenology, Critical Neuroscience, and Global Mental Health edited by Laurence J. Kirmayer, Robert Lemelson and Constance Cummings,[15] and Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Models, and Applications edited by Laurence J. Kirmayer, Carol Worthman, Shinobu Kitayama, Robert Lemelson and Constance A.
[17] The recent revision of the nosology of the American Psychiatric Association, DSM-5, includes a Cultural Formulation Interview that aims to help clinicians contextualize diagnostic assessment.