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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

EV1348

Diagnosis as Translation in Cross-Cultural Psychiatry

DIAGNOSIS AS TRANSLATION IN CROSS-CULTURAL PSYCHIATRY

Culture shapes not only the patient's experience but also how the clinician constructs diagnostic meaning, creating a need for reflective competence that examines the assumptions underlying diagnostic reasoning.

The aim is to propose a conceptual framework that treats diagnosis in cross-cultural psychiatry as a process of interpretation rather than classification; the poster develops a heuristic tool termed reflective hermeneutic competence (RHC). The approach is theoretical and presents no empirical data: it starts from the premise that the ICD and DSM classify symptoms but do not determine how a diagnosis is reached, and that diagnosis requires interpretation beyond the criteria. The process is modeled as the interpretation of clinical input (narrative, behavior, collateral information)—assessing its relevance, reliability, and meaning—followed by arriving at a diagnosis (evidence, clinical significance, context). RHC is presented as a matrix intersecting three domains (facts, values, culture) with three levels (text, meaning the explicit; context, meaning the clinical and institutional; and subtext, meaning the implicit). In practice, it prompts clinicians to ask how they interpret the patient's narrative, which information they give the greatest weight to, and whether context, culture, or an alternative interpretation might change their judgment. A comparison, explicitly framed in terms of broad analytical tendencies rather than national styles, highlights relational context, family input, and functioning in the Chinese context, and subjective accounts, longitudinal course, and explicit justification in the German context. When interpretive expectations do not align, uncertainty may arise even when clinical information is available; the three points at which differences emerge are identified as the construction of meaning, the determination of evidence, and the assessment of clinical significance. The conclusions and implications are to reflect on uncertainty in practice, compare interpretations in training, and operationalize and evaluate RHC in research. Unlike the title listed in the congress program, the poster itself bears a title referring to diagnostic reasoning and a proposal for reflective hermeneutic competence.

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