Psychiatry in South-East Asia

Abstract

In the words of Gunnar Myrdal (1968), `The tendency to think and act in a diplomatic manner when dealing with the problems of the underdeveloped countries of South Asia has in the new era of independence become a counter-part to the "white man's burden" in colonial times'. This is but one, and perhaps the latest of the biases that have entered the Western accounts of Eastern social phenomena. There have been equally strong biases of the opposite kind. One of these has been to make evaluations from the standpoint of the Western culture, considering the latter as essentially `normal' and holding any departures from its prevalent patterns as `deviant' or `abnormal'.