Cultural Neuropsychiatry

Daina Crafa and Saskia K. Nagel coined the term cultural neuropsychiatry, which first appeared in their 2014 article Group differences in mental health: A role for culture in neuropsychiatry and in a blog post for the American Anthropological Association's Anthropology and Mental Health Interest Group.  

Cultural neuropsychiatry refers to any research that studies the complex relationships between neural or genetic processes, mental health, and sociocultural background or context. This research is based on findings that social and cultural information may result in certain brain-based phenomena being encoded differently across populations, and that different gene-environment interactions may influence genetic contributions. Cultural neuropsychiatry proposes that, just as neural and genetic processes vary across sociocultural groups, they may also vary across patient groups of different sociocultural backgrounds. The question is whether they vary in ways similar to control samples sharing their backgrounds, similar to other patient groups across cultures, or whether they are distinct from both. Currently this area of research does not assume causal direction between biological and social phenomena, but rather proposes that differences arise through a complex and mutual interaction and are continually subject to change across an individual's lifespan. The CBB model describes this feedback loop between culture, biology, and disorder.