I think, therefore IB

International mindedness is inherently a mindset of openness to the world, a recognition of our shared humanity, and a genuine respect for cultural diversity. By developing the ability to see the world through multiple lenses, we help students move past ethnocentrism and selfishness towards a real state of empathy, a capability that’s as much about intellectual rigour as it is about social responsibility.

One way to teach International Mindedness in DP Psychology and Theory of Knowledge is to challenge a basic assumption: that what we call ‘normal’ is a universal constant because, ‘normal’ is deeply entangled in culture.

For students of the human sciences, exploring culture-specific mental health experiences dismantles the idea that Western diagnostic categories (like those in the DSM-5) are objective, universal truths. In 1951, Malaysian psychiatrist Pow Meng Yap questioned whether Western frameworks could meaningfully explain local experiences. This question invites us to practise international mindedness by acknowledging that our cultural frameworks are just one of many, rather than ‘the default setting’ for all humanity.

We can look at three specific examples where behaviour is shaped by culture:

• Latah (Malaysia / Southeast Asia): This is a response to sudden fright, most often seen in middle-aged women. Latah involves heightened suggestibility and imitation of others’ behaviour. It isn’t an ‘error’ in physiology. It is a behaviour that only has meaning within local social norms regarding gender, obedience, and social harmony.
• Koro (East and Southeast Asia): A syndrome where individuals (most often young men) experience an overwhelming fear that their genitals are retracting into the body resulting in death. The distress is physiological and real, but the form of the crisis is steeped in cultural beliefs about anatomy and death.
• Spiritual guidance and pathological hallucinations (Ghana / India): In the West, hearing voices indicates schizophrenia, but in Ghana, voices are interpreted as spirits or God giing moral guidance. In India, voices are often perceived as playful, often from familiar family members. In all cases, the perceptual event is the same, but the knowledge system applied to it changes the interpretation from a terrifying mental illness to comforting guidance.

Students can be forgiven for thinking that diagnostic labels, such as schizophrenia or ADHD, have been ‘discovered’ like elements on the Periodic Table, but international mindedness encourages them to see labels/diagnoses as cultural constructs. By studying Latah or Koro, students can learn to separate the universal concept of human suffering from the culture-based narratives used to explain that suffering. This fosters a more nuanced understanding of the sociocultural approach to understanding and explaining behaviour.

The implications for Theory of Knowledge are similarly profound. These culture-specific disorders urge students to ask:

• Who gets to decide which experiences count as illness versus spirituality? (Scope)
• If mental health categories and labels are constructed, what does this reveal about the reliability of the human sciences? (Perspectives)
• Is it ethical to impose ‘Western’ psychological ‘knowledge’ on cultures that have their own functioning systems of meaning? (Ethics)

International mindedness asks students and teachers to tolerate discomfort; the realisation that ‘Western’ frameworks are not necessarily wrong, but they are perhaps incomplete.

When we diagnose distress without looking at social contexts, we risk turning suffering or ill-ease into an individual brain problem. For IB students, developing international mindedness means asking questions like ‘Whose knowledge?’, ‘In what context?’, and ‘For whose benefit?’ When we teach students to see that mental health does not exist without a context, we aren’t just teaching them Psychology or Theory of knowledge, we are helping them develop the humility and global perspective necessary to be internationally minded citizens.

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