How is mental dysfunction detected? How do cultural models of mental disorder affect this process of detection? Attempts to answer these questions have not often been made in the research, as they fall between two domains: that of cross-cultural psychiatry (which looks at the dysfunction itself) and anthropological ethno-psychiatry (which looks at cultural models of sanity and insanity). In this paper, I set out a model to illustrate this ‘missing link’ between behavior and cultural models, founded on experiential evidence for intuitive psychology. Typical adult minds contain certain intuitive expectations about mental function and behavior, and these are used to perceive certain sorts of dysfunctional behavior. It appears that there is a ‘catalogue’ of potential behaviors that activate this intuition, and therefore the symptoms that are present in culturally specific folk-understandings of mental dysfunction are also restricted. It is also suggested that certain mental dysfunctions are ‘invisible’ to folk-understandings due to their lack of obvious breaches of principles of intuitive psychology. This standpoint helps us to comprehend the cultural stability and spread of certain views of mental disorder.