During our lifetime we will encounter many different situations, which will ultimately lead to raised stress levels, i.e. work deadlines, raising our children, relationship problems etc.

But what if the stress you were being caused was as a result of some magical force placed upon you by an enemy, which would ultimately lead to your untimely death. In some cultures this threat is very real. It is commonly known as “voodoo death” this belief in magic and sorcery seen to exist in many cultures across the world i.e. Australian aborigines, Andean highlands, Hong Kong, South East Asia, North Africa, Siberia, the list goes on…

It differs slightly from culture to culture but the general principles are the same all are caused magic and sorcery imposed on one by some other which will ultimately cause the victim harm or even lead to their death.

So how can we try to explain this phenomenon? One of the most famous of explanations comes from Walter B Cannon a famed physiologist who studied the phenomenon. His work focused on the autonomic nervous system. Cannons theory stated that when a person comes across a danger of some sort i.e. An encoun

Susto: found in the Spanish speaking societies in the New World. It is believed that due to a frightening experience the soul has been taken from the body and captured by spirits. The symptoms include depression, loss of appetite, loss of weight, apathy, diarrhoea, swelling of the feet etc. in order to restore health, the body’s equilibrium must be restored.

Koro: exists in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia “ a culture conditioned acute depersonalisation syndrome, with localised depersonalisation confined to the penis, occurring in the context of a panic state with fears of impending death. ” (Yap, The Culture Bound Reactive Syndromes, in, Caudill and Tsung-Yi Lin, Mental Health Research in Asia and the Pacific, Honolulu: East West Center Press, 1951).

Culture Bound Reactive Syndromes otherwise known as folk illnesses or ‘ethnic psychoses’. Some occur in more than one culture i.e. magical death, whilst others are confined to single cultural systems i.e. Hiki Komori in Japan, Windigo in the Canadian Ojibwa Indians.

What are Culture Bound Reactive Syndromes? “ Culture bound in that certain systems of implicit values, social structure and obviously shared beliefs produce unusual forms of Psychopathology that are confined to special areas” (Yap, The Culture Bound Reactive Syndromes, in, Caudill and Tsung-Yi Lin, Mental Health Research in Asia and the Pacific, Honolulu: East West Center Press, 1951).

It has been said that culture bound reactive syndromes have been discussed and studied with a certain distancing from the modern world we live in and not much has been written to suggest otherwise. In a paper written by Cheryl Ritenbaugh she describes obesity as a possible Culture Bound Reactive Syndrome. In my opinion you only have to turn on the TV, look at a billboard, open a newspaper or magazine to see what Western society deems as acceptable weight. Obesity is a frowned upon ‘disease’ and in this society not much sympathy is directed towards its sufferers in fact much criticism is placed upon overweight people thus the reason millions of pounds and dollars are spent every year by people trying to rid themselves of excess weight. The opposite of this is of course Anorexia Nervosa, a disorder that usually affects women, where the person( usually female) stops eating and puts themselves on a near starvation diet combined with over exercise in an attempt to keep their weight down. If this is not treated there is a real risk of a patient dying either from starvation of complications due to this starvation, one famous example being that of Karen Carpenter who died from the illness in the early Eighties. Other western Culture Bound Reactive Syndromes include Agoraphobia, a fear of

Some topics in this essay:
Reactive Syndromes, Center Press, Walter Cannon, , Hysteria‘Pibloktoq’ Foulks, Para-Sympathetic Sympathetic, American Anthropologist, Sympathetic Para-Sympathetic, Curt Richter, Reactive Syndrome, culture bound, bound reactive, culture bound reactive, reactive syndromes, bound reactive syndromes, voodoo death, ‘voodoo death’, mental health research, research asia, health research, mental health, syndromes caudill, health research asia, asia pacific, lin mental health,