| As part of a country with enormously ethnical and cultural diversity along with hundreds of languages spoken, people and communities of Indonesia are ethnically and culturally diverse characterized by traditional outlooks towards health and illness. Despite mental disorders in different cultures consider the existence of universal symptom patterns in major psychiatric disorders, symptoms in areas of thought, perception, affection or motoric activity differs for the reason of emphasized local cultural themes. Patients are likely to engaged symptoms that are most disturbing to their normal psychic needs and self-image, whereas those aspects could be determined by patterns that are persevered within the culture. Values would reward and encourage different patterns of behavior and effect the socio-cultural change on adjustment which then coloring the external manifestation of mental disorders. The study is a preliminary study to investigate the role of individual and cultural values as possible precipitating factors of several mental disorder types where gross impairment in reality testing do not occur. Records are compared among Mental Health Hospitals at Cimahi (West Java), Magelang (Central Java), Yogyakarta and Bali, which comprises a majority of ethnicity (Sundanese, Javanese and Balinese), involving a total number of305 patients. The pattern in which mental illness is mostly coming forward, as well as the preference towards types of intervention given, pictured local cultural beliefs and individual values structure of mental illness patients at those 4 regional hospitals. Mental disorders have been always crucial to the overall well-being of individuals, societies and countries, and must universally regarded in a new light (WHO, 2001). The World Health Report of 2001 enlightened that 450 million people alive today suffer from mental or neurological disorders or from psychosocial problems. For years, scientists are making efforts to reduce the burden of mental and behavioral disorders worldwide, through many approaches and perspectives. Nowadays, most illnesses, mental or physical, are perceived as influenced by a combination of biological, psychological and social factors as well. |