Culture-Bound Syndromes

A pattern of abnormal behavior or distressing experience specific to one culture or a small set of related cultures, recognized within that culture as a coherent illness or affliction even where it does not map cleanly onto a diagnostic category used elsewhere. This group gathers the culture-bound and folk-illness syndromes recorded for this atlas, spanning documented conditions from Latin American, East Asian, South Asian, African, Arctic and Native American traditions among others, each of which this atlas records because a described clinical or anthropological literature treats it as a recognized syndrome within its own cultural setting rather than a universal diagnostic entity.