Psychiatry amongst the Australian Aborigines

Abstract

The notion of transcultural psychiatry is an attractive one. It creates visions of palm-lined beaches and tropical abundance in the midst of which energetic epidemiology leads to aetiological revelations. Nissl commented to his friend Kraepelin (1904), about to embark on his journey to Java, that his research was only a scientific cloak to hide his enthusiasm for travel—a jest that all subsequent transcultural workers have had to suffer. It is unfortunate that not only are the palms and beaches overrated but the differences in culture and morbidity found are often scarcely greater than those existing between sections of one's own society, where even communication may be as great a problem. Even if the contribution made to the understanding of our own illnesses is meagre, transcultural studies can still be justified because they allow us to evaluate the needs of the peoples studied and, we may hope, permit us to indicate how they may be helped. The view sometimes expressed, particularly by anthropologists, that one should endeavour to observe without changing is unacceptable to doctors. Help is indeed required—there are no noble savages nowadays.