PMS and other pathologies are culture-bound syndromes
Look, I’m gonna side eye any opinion on menstruation authored by a man, but the essay Is PMS Real? by Frank Bures offers a fascinating glimpse at culture-bound syndromes:1
The phenomenon of so-called culture-bound syndromes, which more recently have come to be known as “cultural syndromes,” or sometimes, “cultural idioms of distress.” It was a path I started down when I traveled to Nigeria to investigate magical penis theft, in which a person believes his (or sometimes her) genitals to have been stolen via magic. This is known in the medical literatures as koro, or “genital retraction syndrome,” and versions of it have been recorded, among other places, in China, Thailand, and India.
Trying to understand koro, in turn, lead me into a labyrinth of other syndromes, many of which seem unreal to Westerners, though not to those experiencing them. People have “wind attacks” in Cambodia, where the flow of wind through the body reverses or is blocked, causing dizziness, shortness of breath, numbness, and fever. In China some people suffer from “frigophobia,” or the “morbid fear of cold… and the need to wear excessive clothing.” In parts of India you can contract “gilhari syndrome” in which patients arrive at the hospital with swelling on the back of their necks, complaining that a gilhari (a kind of lizard) crawled under their skin and terrified that they will die if the creature reaches their neck.
Eventually this path led me back to my own culture, and to our own syndromes that don’t occur in other cultures. Premenstrual syndrome was near the top of this list.
It’s not quite mass hysteria, but regardless of what’s “real” or not, it’s fascinating how susceptible we are to collective persuasion. (And collective emotions?)
- see also: a social construct doesn’t mean it’s not real
- future links: placebo effect, psychosomatic illnesses?
Other fun fact from the article: “On the island of Wogeo, Papua New Guinea, menstruation is traditionally seen as so powerful and cleansing that even men are expected to menstruate. A man does this by walking into the ocean naked, inducing an erection, pushing the foreskin back, then slicing at the glans on either side with the claw of a crab. When the bleeding stops and the ocean water around the man is clear, he returns to shore, wraps his penis in medicinal leaves, and is considered cleansed. The same word is used for male and female menstruation.” (!!!!) ↩︎