Abstract

Culture is a major determinant of personality and mental health. It follows that if society does not meet the developmental needs of many of its people, rampant psychiatric symptoms will serve as ineffable comments on the culture. Nevertheless, the mental health field often misses the social implications of symptoms it treats. Traditionally, professionals have viewed schizophrenics as most apt to come from an enmeshed, dysfunctional, and seclusive family system; the patient can neither leave nor remain at home, eventually gravitating between home and hospital. Currently, there may be a new pattern of schizophrenia which is precipitated by fragmentation of family bonds rather than enmeshment. This pattern tends to arise in the context of a "no parent family," into which ten percent of American children are now born, with the patient gravitating over time toward inconsolable object-seeking and homelessness