 The mounting evidence that mental disorder is so dramatically shaped by culture seemed to be unsettling. Mainstream psychiatry had long accepted the general claim that cultural factors can play a role in mental health and the etiology of disorders, by creating conditions that trigger unhealthy levels of anxiety or stress, or by stabilizing other circumstances that elicit more extreme and pathological forms of discontent with civilization (Freud 1930). Nonetheless, cultural variation in symptoms was given relatively little attention compared to what were thought to be the core, pan-cultural indicators of universal forms of dysfunction. Indeed, until recently, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) treated disorders commonly found in WEIRD cultures, along with the way they presented in symptoms, as (quasi-) universal, while classifying those only found in other cultures as ‘culture-bound syndromes’ and treating them as exotic outliers. Hence one extreme and slightly tongue-in-cheek description of the perspective adopted by the DSM: “American mental illness is universal, and other cultures have specific conditions” (Murphy 2015).