DER ER TO I ET MØDE: Perspektiver på kulturmødet fra psykiatrien

Resumé

The psychiatric treatment system in Denmark is one of the institutions where the

meeting with the ethnic Other has gained increased attention in the last couple of

years. Even though this is being spoken of as a meeting, focus is normally only

on the ethnic patients, their culture, and the problems staff experience when

working with this group of patients. Doing anthropological research in the Danish

psychiatric system, makes it obvious, however, that the psychiatric system itself

plays an important part in the meeting. Psychiatry has its own way of understanding

what culture is, and its own way of framing how culture can be talked about.

Using a modern, relational concept of culture I will show how the psychiatric

departments can be perceived as producing their own culture and that this culture

plays an important part in how patients with another ethnic background than

Danish are perceived. Patients who are perceived as ethnic are often patients

that psychiatry finds it difficult to treat, either because the technology of treatment

is not suited to this group of patients, or due to the way psychiatry perceives the

relation between psychiatric disorder and culture.