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"Ethnicising" of psychiatry: from universality to internationalism Volume 79, issue 2, Février 2003

Author
78321 Le Mesnil-Saint-Denis Cedex.

The triumph of international classifications in psychiatry (DSM and ICD) is accompanied by a deep change of paradigm in the whole of the discipline. The will to find diagnosis criteria internationally validated for mental disorders is opposed to the theoretical universalism of traditional psychiatry. It changes over the mode of authority of clinical assumptions. At the same time, the ethnopsychiatric dispute of this planetary domination also raises on an abandonment of the universal with the profit of a reification of culture and "empirical" differences. Both share the same commun bases. Deeply penetrated by the relativism which it itself generated while being internationalized, contemporary psychiatry turns necessarily worms of new forms of authority to find a universal value.