Culture-Bound Syndrome

Culture-bound syndrome, also called culture-specific syndrome or folk illness, is a term in medicine and medical anthropology for a combination of psychiatric and somatic symptoms considered a recognizable disease only within a specific society or culture, with no known objective biochemical or structural alteration of body organs or functions and no recognition in other cultures. The term was included in the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1994, which lists the most common culture-bound conditions in its own Appendix I, and its counterpart under the ICD-10 framework is the culture-specific disorders defined in Annex 2 of the Diagnostic Criteria for Research. More broadly, an endemic pattern attributable to certain behaviors within a specific culture, spread through suggestion, communal reinforcement, and person-to-person interaction, may be called a potential behavioral epidemic, though it can be difficult on etiological grounds to separate the causal contribution of culture from other environmental factors.