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Closed-system ‘economic’ models for psychiatric disorders: Western atomism and its culture-bound syndromes

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Culture is as much a part of human biology as the enamel on our teeth.

– Robert Boyd.

Abstract

The stabilization of human cognition via feedback from embedding social and cultural contexts is a dynamic process deeply intertwined with it, constituting, in a sense, the riverbanks directing the flow of a stream of generalized consciousness at different scales: Cultural norms and social interaction are synergistic with individual and group cognition and their disorders. A canonical failure mode in atomistic cultures is found to be a ‘ground state’ collapse well represented by atomistic models of economic interaction that are increasingly characterized as divorced from reality by heterodox economists. That is, high rates of psychopathic and antisocial personality disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder emerge as culture-bound syndromes particular to Western or Westernizing societies, or to those undergoing social disintegration.

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Acknowledgments

The author thanks Dr. D.N. Wallace for fruitful discussions and two reviewers for comments useful in revision.

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  1. Division of Epidemiology, The New York State Psychiatric Institute, New York, NY, USA

    Rodrick Wallace

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  1. Rodrick Wallace
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Correspondence to Rodrick Wallace.

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Wallace, R. Closed-system ‘economic’ models for psychiatric disorders: Western atomism and its culture-bound syndromes. Cogn Process 16, 279–290 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-015-0659-z

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