Culture and psychopathology

•Culture influences the prevalence, symptomatology and course of mental disorders.•Ongoing shift from typifying ethnic groups to viewing culture in terms of ecosocial contexts.•Cultural hybridity and hyper-diversity are characteristic of current urban environments.•DSM-5 introduced a Cultural Formulation Interview to contextualize illness experience.•Embodied-enactivist cognitive science holds promise for new theories of psychopathology.

Recent work on culture and psychopathology is beginning to unpack the cognitive, developmental and interactional processes through which social contexts shape illness onset, experience, course and outcome. New conceptual models, tools, and technologies, along with better data, lend support to an ecosocial view of mental disorders that emphasizes the way that cultural contexts influence developmental processes and exposure to social adversity to increase risk for specific types of psychopathology. This contextual view has implications for research design and clinical practice. Recognizing the importance of culture, DSM-5 now includes a discussion of cultural concepts of mental disorders as well as a Cultural Formulation Interview to help clinicians explore the context of mental health symptoms and disorders.