‘Culture As Cure’ Reading Response

In the reading, “Culture As Cure,” author Vilma Santiago-Irizarry discusses the effect on patients when cultural elements are incorporated into a mental facility. In order to study the effects of “cultural sensitivity,” invoked on the mentally ill, Santiago-Irizarry studied a Hispanic bilingual and bicultural program and its patients.

She ran into many questions surrounding the idea of culture, and the identifying characteristics of culture. In ethnography, these are valid questions. Santiago-Irizarry calls labeling as something that involves specification and homogenization. These ideas can diminish the very value that cultural sensitivity attempts to establish. For example, grouping “Hispanic culture” into one label ignores the many intricacies that are involved that go beyond a sweeping category. For example, someone with Mexican heritage will have some different cultural ideas than does a person from Puerto Rico. Yet, they are both lumped into the same Hispanic culture category.

That being said, Santiago-Irizarry found that integrating elements of each person’s cultural identity, as well as the common elements to their culture, into the developed care facility culture can produce positive results. An example includes someone who had a fear of medicine because of a cultural belief in spirits. Once that core belief was validated, and included in the treatment process along with traditional medicine, there were signs of positive reactions (i.e., the person no longer refused to take the medicine).

Santiago-Irizarry found that “translation in each other’s terms” could have positive affects on those involved in the study. The value to ethnography is that Santiago-Irizarry took information she gathered and developed it into a working theory for a possible way to provide assistance to those with mental illness.

This reading was quite interesting to read, as it introduced many ideas that I had not thought of previously, including how culture does affect those around us.