I've been thinking about this:
"what cross-cultural psychiatrists and anthropologists have to tell us is that all mental illnesses, including depression, P.T.S.D. and even schizophrenia, can be every bit as influenced by cultural beliefs and expectations today as hysterical-leg paralysis or the vapors or zar or any other mental illness ever experienced in the history of human madness. This does not mean that these illnesses and the pain associated with them are not real, or that sufferers deliberately shape their symptoms to fit a certain cultural niche. It means that a mental illness is an illness of the mind and cannot be understood without understanding the ideas, habits and predispositions — the idiosyncratic cultural trappings — of the mind that is its host."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html
with respect to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypal_personality_disorder
What does it mean to have a mental illness whose symptoms include the beliefs that a person holds?
