“One of the prob­lems,” author Frank Bures said in a recent Atlantic inter­view, “is this whole dis­tinc­tion between real and not real.”

Bures is the author of The Geog­ra­phy of Mad­ness: Penis Thieves, Voodoo Death, and the Search for the Mean­ing of the World’s Strangest Syn­dromes.  His book exam­ines con­di­tions that the DSM‑V, a man­u­al used to diag­nose and clas­si­fy men­tal dis­or­ders, terms “cul­ture-bound syn­dromes.” Con­tin­ue read­ing →