Write a 7 page essay on Western Standards of Psychologic.Download file to see previous pages... Although psychiatry is itself a science, it cannot be said to lend itself to perfect quantitative method

Write a 7 page essay on Western Standards of Psychologic.

Although psychiatry is itself a science, it cannot be said to lend itself to perfect quantitative method of diagnoses the way hematology and toxicology have methods for diagnosing physical problems. And yet, no one would deny that biochemical considerations are involved in psychiatry. The brain is after all, the same physical composition as the rest of the body, and moreover, many psychiatric drugs effectively control – and, through biochemistry, symptoms, from a variety of psychiatric disorders. While the etiology or understanding of causes of disorders in psychiatry and the treatment of symptoms has progressed, the assessment process of psychiatry does pose a lot of challenges to scientific legitimacy. It will be argued in the following analysis that bias in testing [Goldstein 533] remains a persistent problem in the clinical evaluation of psychiatric disorders or with formal assessments, and this bias is particularly prevalent in the evaluation of people who are not from a group with values reflecting a European or American background, along with being in the socio-economic group of the middle-class and above. Cultural bias in testing is a fairly long-understood phenomenon. In the United States, it has for some time been known for example that visible minorities, and in particular, African Americans have done worse on a proportionate basis than middle-class youth from a European background on the standardized entrance test for university. At at the same time, the standardized testing used at the graduate level, with, for example, law school and medical school demonstrate that there is a consistency among minorities and individuals of the dominant class. In other words, if an individual can make it to an undergraduate program and through that, their cultural differences or 'bias in testing' at the end of the program are not as significant as when they entered the undergraduate program. It has long been known that the test-scores reflect not just academic ability, but a familiarity and command of the cultural values that are expressed or a part of the language of the test [Goldstein 540]. Further, critics point to an inverted situation as a counter-example of how 'test bias' involves cultural variables that help shape or determine the outcome or results. The counter-example would be a situation where individuals from the middle-class and above, and from a European background were to take an exam written entirely with the idioms of a culture that was non-European [Martin, Volkmar, and Lewis: 61]. One can imagine the difficulties a white male from the suburbs of outer Liverpool, Manchester or London would fair on an exam that was written using the terminology and sentence structure of a first-generation Jamaican who was living in Brixton. Jamaican is a good example of a language or medium for communication with significant linguistic differences than the 'received pronunciation' that might be taught at Eton or Harrow School's. Jamaican has differences in both dialect with regard to English usage, but also incorporates terminology from “Patois” that is arguably a self-contained language that does not exactly correspond to a European language. That is, even though there are a lot of structural and semantic similarities. It can be said that one of the principle or central problems with bias in testing concerns the very notion of “linguistic relativity”. This is a notion that maintains that there are not always perfect translations that can be made between languages, and moreover, that this imperfect translation has much to do with other cultural variables such as values, belief systems and basic knowledge and shared understanding of the world, so to speak.