global viewpoints on schizophrenia

I am posting the below link as a comment on globalized psychiatric techniques. The article discusses current mental health practices in India, and how they relate to Western understandings of mental illness, and its bounds, descriptors, and symptoms.

Most interesting for me was the focus on the experience of mental illness. As one doctor in the interview says, the symptoms may be similar world-wide but the actual lived and social understanding of the illness varies due to differing worldviews. This becomes especially clear when the social context has established practices that may include actions or experiences similar to those that are symptoms of mental illness - such as hearing voices or having hallucinations.

How does this reflect upon madness and a conception of, interactions with, and social experience of it? How does it affect the lived experience of those interacting with people who are "mentally ill"? And if context and lived experience do affect each other to this degree, how does one label "mental illness" at all?

For me, I would tentatively refer to my prior blog post - suffering in the person with whom one is interacting can be very clear, and from that I infer something is wrong. However; the concept, social constructs, and psychiatric assumptions surrounding this word "schizophrenia" require some deep analysis and serious socio-political contextualization in order to be truly understood.

Link: All in the Mind, Radio National, with Natasha Mitchell. 23 March 2003. http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/mind/s811522.htm