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[HereSince1628]

22. Generally speaking, many of us would expect mentally ill to not conform to cultural expectations

with regard to one or more of the following--behavior, emotionality or cognition.

However, deviance, and the dysfunctional social reactions that it attracts, IS NOT a sufficient criteria for a mental illness dx. IMO (and that of U.S. and E.U. psychiatric professionals) one must be extremely careful about advancing deviance from cultural norms as sufficient evidence to warrant any dx of mental disorder.

Without such care, societies risk using dx's to commit crimes against humanity...sentencing legitimate social critics and political opponents, and those merely eccentric, to confinement in institutions--as has been done in various totalitarian regimes last century.

One of the truly important questions to be considered about specific mental illnesses is whether or not a condition appears to be independent of culture vs whether it is restricted to a specific culture. Although belief itself is to some extent an artifact of culture, there seems to be concurrence among researchers that observation of an identical 'condition' across varying cultures is important evidence supporting the notion that the said condition is 'empirically real' and not an artifact of culture/subculture.

I think it's important to remember that both culture and mental illness are like colored lenses that cannot help but limit (and potentially distort) significant portions of the spectrum of light that we depend upon to illuminate our consideration and behavior.