What is it about?
While psychiatrists in Vietnam use internationally recognized diagnoses such as generalized anxiety disorder, their patients describe their anxiety-related symptoms as the product of neurasthenia, a now defunct category of psychiatric disorder in the West. What appeal does neurasthenia have for patients? How do psychiatric diagnoses reflect culturally-specific ways of defining the person? Why do psychiatric diagnoses become more or less popular with time? Finally, what does the experience of anxiety have to do with global capitalism?
Featured Image
Why is it important?
This article examines the differences between doctors and patients' concepts about mental illness in Vietnam. Doctors often try to correct their patients' ideas without fully understanding them. This article argues that patients' ways of understanding their anxiety is not simply outdated but also affirms their model of being a good person. I hope this article leads to
Perspectives
This article takes neurasthenia, a classic case study in cross-cultural psychiatry, and updates it for the 21st century. Neurasthenia originated as a diagnosis usually reserved for wealthy Americans in the late 1800s. The connections between them and lower class Vietnamese as Vietnam currently undergoes rapid social change and economic development are fascinating to me. Most importantly, I tried to let patients speak for themselves. Their perspectives on their own illness are too often ignored.
Allen Tran
Bucknell University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Neurasthenia, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and the Medicalization of Worry in a Vietnamese Psychiatric Hospital, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, June 2016, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/maq.12297.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
