Culture plays a role in the presentation of one’s anxious symptoms in the same way that an organism always responds to its particular niche. The creation of a common, socially accepted medium through which anxiety can present itself has become a recognized part of cultural history for millennia, always being a part of the written records. One way to think of this dynamic involves the concept of a symptom pool, i.e., that any given culture has its own various symptoms which it sanctions as permissible outlets for the experience anxiety.
In Haiti or other cultures bound by voodoo, some-one experiencing anxiety may be seen as under the spell of a root. In Puerto Rico, the syndrome ataque de nervios is well known; in Asian cultures, Amok (a period of withdrawn brooding followed by violent outbursts, all of which is denied and forgotten later) and Koro (a fear of genital retraction, often after sexual involvement) are well known.
A woman experiencing anxiety in the United States today may choose the outlet of an eating disorder from amongst the available symptoms in the pool. In caricature, every New Yorker becomes neurotic and ends up on a psychoanalyst’s couch. Or, different cultures may vary in their sanctioning versus prohibiting the use of alcohol or marijuana.
Culture also affects anxiety manifestations in their stigmatization. In either Indian or Asian cultures, for example, members can feel that suffering from anxiety indicates weakness. Often, families guard generations of secrecy and shame surrounding a family history of mental illness. The institutionalization, suicide attempts, domestic violence, or drug addiction of any family member can lead to stigmatization regardless of culture. Fear of showing weakness leads to continuation of the conspiracy of silence.
As family members continue to torture themselves with their own anxiety symptoms and remain in isolation, children and young adults suffering from anxiety can grow up to become the same restricted parents they swore they would never become.
Finally, culture can allow for differing philosophical structures. In the West, we have tended to see the mind as separate from the body for more than 500 years; we are only now starting to look meaningfully at the impossibility of separating mind from body. We like to see problems as relating to their pathophysiology; we like to prove ideas with studies that sustain rigorous statistical analysis, often pooling large samples of data together.
In the East, mind and body never parted company. The life force chi defines health; doc-tors receive a salary until a patient becomes ill; and traditional healing methods only now undergoing rigorous scientific methodological testing coexist naturally with Western techniques. Asian cultures allow for the power of the mind to profoundly shape a size of one human life.