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The colonial government of southern Nigeria began to use asylums to confine the allegedly insane in 1906. These asylums were administered by the British but confined Africans. Yet, as even many in the government recognized, insanity is a condition that shows cultural variation. Who decided the inmates were insane and how? This sophisticated historical study pursues these questions as it examines fascinating source material—writings by African patients in these institutions and the reports of officials, doctors, and others—to discuss the meaning of madness in Nigeria, the development of colonial psychiatry, and the connections between them. Jonathan Sadowsky's well-argued, concise study p...
For more than a century, anthropologists and psychiatrists engage in conversations concerning relationships between embodied well-being and religion. Taking account of shifting meanings of 'religion' in global modernities, the included essays reveal how historically and culturally embedded local encounters between psychiatry, religious experience, and ritual healing contribute to an increasing diversification of 'mental health.' The multitude of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches brought to the field in the global north and the global south introduce novel insights into current debates between clinical practitioners, ethnographic fieldworkers, and historians of psychiatry. (Series: Culture, Religion and Psychiatry, Vol. 1) [Subject: Psychiatry, Religious Studies, Ethnography, Sociology]
Researchers studying the health of migrants frequently use standard quantitative instruments to assess psychological constructs. Such instruments are often validated only in the respective source population of migrants. For example, when studying Turkish migrants in Germany, instruments validated in Turkey are applied. However, considerable differences in culture and language may have developed between migrants and their source population. These differences limit the validity and reliability of quantitative instruments, a problem that is often overlooked. Using the example of the Revised Illness Perception Questionnaire (IPQ-R), the authors demonstrate that instruments known to be valid and reliable in source populations may lead to biased results when applied to migrant populations.
Cultural psychiatry is primarily concerned with the transcultural aspects of mental health related to human behavior, psychopathology and treatment. At a clinical level, cultural psychiatry aims to promote culturally relevant mental health care for patients of diverse ethnic or cultural backgrounds. From the standpoint of research, cultural psychiatry is interested in studying how ethnic or cultural factors may influence human behavior and psychopathology as well as the art of healing. On a theoretical level, cultural psychiatry aims to expand the knowledge and theories about mental health-related human behavior and mental problems by widening the sources of information and findings transcul...
Psychiatric Contours investigates new histories of psychiatry, derangement, and agitated subjectivities in colonial and decolonizing Africa. The volume lets the multivalent term madness broaden perception, well beyond the psychiatric. Many chapters detect the mad or the psychiatric in unhinged persons, frantic collectives, and distressing situations. Others investigate individuals suffering from miscategorization. A key Foucauldian word, vivacity, illuminates how madness aligns with pathology, creativity, turbulence, and psychopolitics. The archives, patient-authored or not, speak to furies and fantasies inside asylums, colonial institutions, decolonizing missions, and slave ships. The fraye...
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