Panic Disorder, Somatization, and the New Cross-cultural Psychiatry: The Seven Bodies of a Medical Anthropology of Panic

The authors take sensation as the key unit ofanalysis, aiming to contribute to a medicalanthropology of sensation, which includes the full spectrum of panicattack sensations, the biological generation of panic sensations, and sensation as invoking memory.

Abstract

This article aims to adduce a framework that will allow for the cross-cultural study of panic disorder. The authors take sensation as the key unit of analysis, aiming to contribute to a medical anthropology of sensation. The seven analytic perspectives that are suggested in the article are the following: the full spectrum of panic attack sensations (the sensation body), the biological generation of panic sensations (the biological body), sensation as invoking an ethnophysiology (the ethnophysiological body), sensation as metaphor (the metaphoric body), sensation as invoking the landscape (the landscape body), sensation as invoking catastrophic cognitions (the catastrophic cognitions body), and sensation as invoking memory (the memory-associational body).