Partly in response to the critics, the DSM’s editorial task force has convened a special committee of 20 advisers to figure out what to do with the category. Helming the committee is Dr. Roberto Lewis-Fernández, a clinical psychiatry professor at Columbia University who helped write the appendix nearly 20 years ago. What to do with the appendix, however, is proving a thorny problem to solve. It’s not because no one is sure whether pibloktoq is a real thing, although that’s an open question. It’s because the whole debate turns on an issue that psychiatry itself has yet to agree on: how much mental illnesses are a manifestation of the cultures in which they arise. And whether, when it comes to how culture and human psychology intersect, it’s time to start seeing the West as a culture too.
— Do some cultures have their own ways of going mad? - Boston.com
