Culture and Context in Mental Health Diagnosing: Scrutinizing the DSM-5 Revision

Abstract

This article examines the revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) and its claim of incorporating a “greater cultural sensitivity.” The analysis reveals that the manual conveys mixed messages as it explicitly addresses the critique of being ethnocentric and having a static notion of culture yet continues in a similar fashion when culture is applied in diagnostic criteria. The analysis also relates to current trends in psychiatric nosology that emphasize neurobiology and decontextualize distress and points to how the DSM-5 risks serving as an ethnic dividing line in psychiatry by making sociocultural context relevant only for some patients.