Past Issues

Background: Immigrants have great risk for psychiatric disorders under cultural
impact. Increasing cross-cultural stress-related psychiatric problems can be
expected due to increasing international communications contemporarily. Psychiatrists
need to be familiar to the diverse manifestations of immigrants’ psychopathology.
Case Report: A Haitian male postgraduate student developed transient
psychotic symptoms which were apparently related to cross-cultural stress and resembled
those of bouffée délirante, which is a variant of acute and transient psychotic
disorder and is regarded as a culture-bound syndrome in DSM-IV. Conclusion:
We review literature and discuss immigrants’ paranoid reaction, culture-bound
syndrome, historical concepts of bouffée délirante, and application of cultural formulation
in clinical practice. We wish that these viewpoints can decrease the
chance of having inaccurate diagnosis and giving suboptimal intervention caused
by diffi culties in interpreting the immigrants’ psychopathology.