Toward a Puerto Rican popular nosology: nervios and ataque de nervios

• Published in: Culture, medicine and psychiatry Vol. 27; no. 3; pp. 339 - 366
• Main Authors: Guarnaccia, Peter J, Lewis-Fernández, Roberto, Marano, Melissa Rivera
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands Springer Nature B.V 01-09-2003
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Aged; Anthropology; Anxiety; Anxiety - diagnosis; Anxiety - ethnology; Anxiety - etiology; Attitude to Health - ethnology; Classification; Cultural differences; Cultural Diversity; Culture; Diagnosis; Diagnosis, Differential; Epidemiology; Female; Folk beliefs; Folk culture; Fuzzy sets; Health; Health care policy; Hispanic Americans - psychology; Humans; Illness; Interviews as Topic; Latin American cultural groups; Male; Medical anthropology; Medical research; Medicine; Medicine, Traditional; Mental disorders; Mental health; Mental health care; Mental Illness; Mental stress; Middle Aged; Naming; New York City; New York City, New York; Popular Culture; Psychiatric Status Rating Scales; Psychiatry; Psychological Distress; Puerto Rican Americans; Puerto Ricans; Puerto Rico; Puerto Rico - ethnology; Research methodology; Stress, Psychological - diagnosis; Stress, Psychological - ethnology; Stress, Psychological - etiology; Terminology as Topic; Work groups; New York City; Puerto Rico; New York; United States > US; New York City New York
• ISSN: 0165-005X; 1573-076X
• DOI: 10.1023/A:1025303315932

This paper is about naming illnesses--about who determines what categories are used and the implications of these determinations. The central concerns of medical/psychiatric anthropology have been to understand popular categories of and systems for classification of illness, to examine the relationship of illness categories to cultural understandings of the body, and to interpret the role of categories of illness in mediating between the personal and social spheres. At the same time, the paper also discusses the interplay of popular categories and psychiatric diagnoses. This paper examines the multiple experiences of nervios among Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico and New York City. Our contention is that nervios is more than a diffuse idiom of distress, and that there are different categories and experiences of nervios which provide insights into how distress is experienced and expressed by Puerto Ricans and point to different social sources of suffering. The data in this paper come from the responses to a series of open-ended questions which tapped into people's general conceptions of nervios and ataques de nervios. These questions were incorporated into follow-up interviews to an epidemiological study of the mental health of adults in Puerto Rico. The results suggest ways to incorporate these different categories of nervios into future research and clinical work with different Latino groups in the United States and in their home countries.