Page 6 - Teens and Mental Health

Mental Health and Cultural Norms

Mental illness is often stigmatized because it can’t easily be seen or
quantified. Physical diseases, such as diabetes and cancer, manifest
themselves as bodily changes or physical impairments that stand out as
unusual. They can be tested and measured. Mental illnesses, by contrast,
involve behaviors, feelings, and thoughts. Those can’t be tested or
measured. There isn’t always a clear dividing line marking the difference
between healthy and unhealthy behaviors, feelings, and thoughts. Instead,
it depends on what is seen as normal or abnormal for the context.
However, conceptions of normality are shaped by societal expectations.
This means mental health is, at least in part, a culturally bound concept.
In other words, judgments about which behaviors, feelings, and thoughts
are normal can differ across cultures and times. For example, in the 1960s
the American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental
dysfunction. Today it is commonly accepted in the United States that
differences in sexual preferences simply reflect the range of normal human
variations that occur in nature.

The fact that cultural attitudes and beliefs can influence how we
understand mental illness makes the concept of mental health harder to
pin down. It also means mental health professionals need to take cultural
context into consideration when working with patients from different
cultural backgrounds.

For example, it is normal to feel stressed out about a big test,
an important job interview, or a difficult personal situation. It isn’t
normal to have constant bouts of crippling anxiety over little things like
getting on the bus every morning or taking a precise number of steps
down the stairs. According to mental health experts, such excessive
levels of anxiety may be pathological, or a sign of a disorder. As Terje
Ogden and Kristine Amlund Hagen write in their book Adolescent

Mental Health, “It is when anxious feelings interfere with daily activities

10