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Mental Disorders And Its Effects On Psychological Disorders

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Mental disorders are defined as a “syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental function” (Shiraev & Levy, 2017, 2017, p.253). While there are numerous symptoms, there are several that are highly associated with mental disorders including substantial distress or a form of impediment in social settings and other important events. Culture has a great impact on psychological disorders influencing five critical areas: subjective experience, idioms of distress, diagnoses, treatment, and the outcome. Subjective experience is the individual’s understanding about …show more content…

On the other hand, however, the absolutist perspective disregards the differences and states that “people share a great number of similar features, including attitudes, values, and behavioral responses” (Shiraev & Levy, 2017, p.254). Therefore, suggesting that mental disorders should be universally understood. It further suggests that because it emphasizes the existence of absolute, symptoms pf psychopathology is constant and unchanging across cultures (Shiraev & Levy, 2017, p.254). The relativist perspective, however, emphasizes the importance on the uniqueness found in each culture and stresses that it cannot be understood outside of the context. Mainly, the relativist approach agrees that psychopathology is culture specific and should have different meaning in different societies (Shiraev & Levy, 2017, p.254). Therefore, by accepting this perspective, views of psychopathology formed in one cultural environment is not effective in other cultures’ conditions. The universalist approach does view the cultural impact as important but it is not considered excessively for psychopathological phenomena. Instead, “psychopathological phenomena across countries and cultures tends to be universal terms of their

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