Psychiatry deals with pathology of cognition, feelings and self-concept and hence cannot remain uninfluenced by man’s sociocultural and religious background. Culture is an important determinant of manifestations of various psychiatric disorders and has been defined in various ways. Cultural influences on psychiatric syndromes can occur in at least six distinct ways following as pathogenic effect (cultural influence on the formation of a disorder), psychoselective effect (culture selecting certain coping patterns to deal with stress), psychoplastic effect (culture modifying the clinical manifestation), pathoelaborating effect (culture elaborating mental conditions into a unique nature), psychofacilitating effect (culture promoting the frequency of occurrence) and psychoreactive effect (culture shaping folk responses to the clinical condition). The recognition of this unequivocal influence of culture on psychiatric disorders has led to the development of concept of Culture-bound Syndromes. Culture bound syndromes denote a specific array of behavioral and experiential phenomena that tend to present themselves preferentially in particular sociocultural contexts and are readily recognized as illness behavior by people of that culture.