Culture shapes who we are, so it follows that it would also shape our manifestations of stress, mental disorder, emotion. Yet, that also implies a kind of messiness that modern psychology and psychiatry, particularly the American kind, have spent the last 100 years struggling to tidy up.
Since their founding, psychology and psychiatry have striven to standardize the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders — to bring some certainty to what can feel like a very uncertain field.
