Cross cultural variations in psychiatrists’ perception of mental illness: A tool for teaching culture in psychiatry

• We identified differences in psychiatrists’ diagnostic practices of mental illness in USA and India.
• Indian psychiatrists found somatic symptoms like pain and sleep to be more frequent in depression.
• American psychiatrists found pessimism about the future to be more significantly seen in depression.
• Indian psychiatrists found violent and aggressive behavior to be significantly more frequent in mania.
• Both groups found the most common symptoms in psychosis to be the same.

A frequent debate in psychiatry is to what extent major psychiatric diagnoses are universal versus unique across cultures. We sought to identify cultural variations between psychiatrists’ diagnostic practices of mental illness in Boston Massachusetts and Bangalore, India. We surveyed psychiatrists to identify differences in how frequently symptoms appear in major mental illness in two culturally and geographically different cities. Indian psychiatrists found somatic symptoms like pain, sleep and appetite to be significantly more important in depression and violent and aggressive behavior to be significantly more common in mania than did American psychiatrists. American psychiatrists found pessimism about the future to be more significant in depression and pressured speech and marked distractibility to be more significant in mania than among Indian psychiatrists. Both groups agreed the top four symptoms of psychosis were paranoia, lack of insight, delusions and auditory hallucinations and both groups agreed that visual hallucinations and motor peculiarities to be least significant. Despite a different set of resources, both groups noted similar barriers to mental health care access. However, American psychiatrists found substance abuse to be a significant barrier to care whereas Indian psychiatrists found embarrassing the family was a significant barrier to accessing care. Because psychiatrists see a large volume of individuals across different cultures, their collective perception of most common symptoms in psychiatric illness is a tool in finding cultural patterns.