Pressing Need for Chinese Translation of Mental Health Scales

People from different cultural backgrounds express mental disorders diversely. Investigating mental health disorders in different cultures is controversial and can best be explained by two positions embedded in cross-cultural psychiatry: the universalistic position versus the relativistic position. Culture can play a significant role in variations in behaviour, and measurement of behavior in a cross-cultural context calls for the use of adapted instruments. The global population (cultural) diversity entails a pressing need for cross-culturally validated measures or scales which can be used to ascertain the varying mental health needs of diverse populations from multicultural societies. Given the high prevalence of mental disorders and the lack of mental health scales in China, it is necessary to translate and cross-culturally adapt mental health scales to Chinese.