THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE

“An encounter with another person is always traumatic,” ethnopsychiatrist Tobie Nathan has written, adding that the real issue lies in the “translatability of the other” (T. Nathan, “La follia degli altri,” in Saggi di Etnopsichiatria, ed. Ponte delle Grazie (Florence), 1990, p. 66). The Treccani definition of ethnopsychiatry is “the branch of psychiatry that studies the particular features of the onset, symptomology, and development of mental disturbances within the various ethnic and social groups, taking stock of the cultural concepts behind how they are classified and treated.”
Ethnopsychiatry attempts to define the concepts of normality and pathology in relation to the historical, social, cultural, economic, and somatic variables and characteristics of the different ethnic groups, and is opposed to the idea that mental disturbances are biological and universal in nature.
In Europe in recent years, the field of ethnopsychiatry has grown and helped many people who have migrated to the continent. Ethnopsychiatry has helped to weave connections between one culture and another and between illness and treatment, within a specific cultural, social, religious, historical, economic, and political context.
As Roberto Beneduce has suggested, however, it is a difficult, multi-form, groundbreaking, and nomadic field (2019). For more on his view, see R. Beneduce,
Etnopsichiatria: Sofferenza Mentale e Alterità fra Storia, Dominio e Cultura, Carocci (Roma), 2019.