Cultural Influences on Mental Health

Culture plays a fundamental role in shaping how mental health and mental illness are understood, experienced, expressed, and treated. It influences concepts of normality and distress, explanatory models, symptom presentation, coping strategies, and help-seeking behaviors. In increasingly diverse societies, understanding cultural influences on mental health has become essential for equitable and effective mental healthcare. Psychological distress may be expressed and communicated in different ways across cultural and social contexts. This includes emotional, cognitive, behavioral, somatic, spiritual, and culturally specific idioms of distress. Failure to adequately consider these dimensions can have negative consequences, such as misunderstanding, diagnostic bias, misdiagnosis, and inappropriate or insufficient treatment. Culturally informed assessment and cultural formulation are therefore important components of contemporary psychiatric and psychotherapeutic practice.Migration and forced displacement create specific, concrete challenges. Migrants, refugees, and ethnic minorities encounter multiple barriers: trauma, family separation, poverty, language obstacles, and precarious legal status. Healthcare access can become difficult. Racism, discrimination, and social exclusion have been found to be important social and structural risk factors for mental health. They can shape help-seeking, experiences within healthcare, trust in institutions, and treatment outcomes. Cultural factors also influence stigma, pathways to care, and preferences for professional, familial, community-based, religious, or traditional sources of support. Patients bring different languages, family values, and expectations of their healthcare provider into clinical encounters, affecting how decisions are made together. Professional interpreters and cultural mediators may therefore play an important role in improving accessibility, communication, and quality of care.This Research Topic aims to bring together theoretical and empirical work, spanning clinical practice and multiple disciplines, on culture and mental health. Particular attention will be given to approaches that move beyond static concepts of cultural competence towards cultural humility, critical self-reflection, intersectionality, structural competence, and culturally responsive care.In addition, this Research Topic seeks to advance a more nuanced understanding of how cultural, social, and structural factors shape mental health and mental healthcare, and to identify approaches that can contribute to more equitable, inclusive, and effective mental health services across diverse populations and settings.This collection welcomes research addressing topics including, but not limited to: - Cultural concepts and explanatory models of mental illness;-Expectations, cultural expressions and idioms of distress; -Migration, displacement, and mental health; - Racism, discrimination, and social exclusion; - Stigma and help-seeking; - Cultural formulation and diagnostic bias; -Language barriers, interpreters, and cultural mediators; - Family and community perspectives; - Cultural competence and cultural humility; intersectionality; - Structural inequalities and barriers to care- Culturally adapted interventions; - Culturally responsive, person-centered, and human-rights-based mental healthcare. Topic editors: Meryam Schouler-Ocak, Wulf Rössler, James Kenneth Moran, Gizem Kaya, Franziska Kroehn-Liedtke, Nikolaos Tsamitros Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/86854/cultural-influences-on-mental-health