“Insanity is then a part of the price we pay for civilisation. The causes of the one increase with the developments and results of the other” (Jarvis, 1851).Emil Kraepelin, while visiting southeast Asia at the turn of the century, noted the absence of depression among various Asian populations. He believed that mental disorders were organic diseases for which specific pathogens would ultimately be found. Despite the cultural variations in mental disorders he observed during his world trip in 1904, he considered mental disorder to be universal: “mental illness in Java showed broadly the same clinical picture as we see in our country … The overall similarity far outweighed the deviant features.”