This paper is intended to cast into sharper relief the range of issues connected to cultural consonance model and the causal forces involved in it. First I examine the reasoning about the properties of culture as a type of chronic stressor implicit in cultural consonance theory. Then I provide a selective review of literature on sociocultural factors in health focusing on the social stress model, and offer a range of criticisms to the current formulation of the cultural consonance model reflecting on its potential to explain the observed inter-informant differences in mental health attributable to one’s incongruence with a cultural standard.