Transcultural Psychiatry
April 1, 2018
Marco Aurélio Vinhosa Bastos, Paulo Roberto Haidamus de Oliveira Bastos, Igraíne Helena Scholz Osório et al.
12 citations
Mediumship and spirit possession are cultural phenomena found in many societies worldwide. In Brazil, Spiritism (a tradition in which mediumship is emphasized) is the third largest religious denomination. The present study aimed to investigate physiologic correlates of nonpathological dissociative experiences by comparing 20 female spiritist mediums with several years of socially sanctioned...
Transcultural Psychiatry
April 2018
Melissa Taitimu, John Read, Tracey McIntosh
This project explored how Māori understand experiences commonly labelled "schizophrenic" or "psychotic". Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 57 Māori participants who had either personal experiences labelled as "psychosis" or "schizophrenia", or who work with people with such experiences; including tangata whaiora (users of mental health services), tohunga (traditional healers),...
Transcultural Psychiatry
April 1, 2017
Maurice Eisenbruch
32 citations
This paper reports an ethnographic study of mass fainting among garment factory workers in Cambodia. Research was undertaken in 2010-2015 in 48 factories in Phnom Penh and 8 provinces. Data were collected in Khmer using nonprobability sampling. In participant observation with monks, factory managers, health workers, and affected women, cultural understandings were explored. One or more episodes...
Transcultural Psychiatry
October 1, 2016
Ayesha Ahmad, Simon Dein
2 citations
Multicultural societies such as the United Kingdom are host to people with diverse belief systems and behavioral norms. Whilst a country requires that all members of society conform to standardized legal requirements, cases arise that involve certain complexities related to the cultural or religious context in which a certain action was committed. This paper addresses the impact of culture on...
Transcultural Psychiatry
August 5, 2016
Nev Jones, Timothy Kelly, Mona M Shattell
22 citations
There is a growing literature on what contemporary cultural theorists have broadly termed the "postsecular": the abandonment of clear-cut boundaries between the secular and nonsecular in the industrialized West and an embrace of a complex understanding of what is real that neither accepts nor rejects the supernatural. These new cultural currents may affect not only philosophers and theologians,...
Transcultural Psychiatry
April 1, 2016
Khashayar Beigi
2 citations
While Russia has historically and geographically close ties with Islam, the second most-practiced religion in its vast territories, the collapse of the USSR changed the terms of this relationship in significant ways. One key shift is the emergence of new immigration patterns between Russia and former Soviet states. Traversing distant lands from the peripheries of the Caucasus and Central Asia...
Transcultural Psychiatry
December 1, 2015
Jan Dirk Blom, Igmar T Poulina, Trevor L Van Gellecum et al.
Brua is an Afro-Caribbean religion and healing tradition from the southern part of the former Netherlands Antilles. Like other Caribbean healing traditions, it plays a significant role in shaping how individuals experience and express disorders which Western health professionals consider to require psychiatric care. Because little has been published on Brua, and because patients from Aruba,...
Transcultural Psychiatry
August 1, 2015
Laurence J. Kirmayer
188 citations
Mindfulness meditation and other techniques drawn from Buddhism have increasingly been integrated into forms of psychotherapeutic intervention. In much of this work, mindfulness is understood as a mode of awareness that is present-centered and nonevaluative. This form of awareness is assumed to have intrinsic value in promoting positive mental health and adaptation by interrupting discursive...
Transcultural Psychiatry
August 2015
Geoffrey Samuel
Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), and other "mindfulness"-based techniques have rapidly gained a significant presence within contemporary society. Clearly these techniques, which derive or are claimed to derive from Buddhist meditational practices, meet genuine human needs. However, questions are increasingly raised regarding what these...
Transcultural Psychiatry
August 1, 2015
Chikako Ozawa-de Silva
Mindfulness in the Buddhist tradition involves a variety of practices, and contemporary secular forms of mindfulness practices, therapies, and interventions can similarly be broadened to include more of these forms. The Japanese practice of Naikan takes one mindfulness practice from the Buddhist tradition--that of recollecting the kindness of others--and asks clients to engage in this practice...
Transcultural Psychiatry
February 4, 2015
Inger Agger
After catastrophic events in which people's survival has been threatened, as happened during the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia 1975-1979, some continue to suffer from painful mental symptoms. Surveys carried out in Cambodia based on Western diagnostic categories have found a high prevalence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety symptoms in the population. This study...
Transcultural Psychiatry
April 2014
Baland Jalal, Joseph Simons-Rudolph, Bamo Jalal et al.
This cross-cultural study compared explanations of sleep paralysis (SP) in two countries and two groups with different levels of education in one country. Comparisons were made between individuals having experienced SP at least once in a lifetime from Cairo, Egypt (n = 89), Copenhagen, Denmark (n = 59), and the American University in Cairo, Egypt (n = 44). As hypothesized, participants from the...
Transcultural Psychiatry
October 1, 2013
Ria Reis
37 citations
This article examines children's enactment of spirit possession idioms and witchcraft in Africa including the meanings such idioms provide and the local healing resources they mobilize. Idioms of haunting spirits in Northern Uganda and witch-children elsewhere in Africa can be interpreted as manifestations of social crises and mass traumatic stress. On the other hand, such idioms also allow...
Transcultural Psychiatry
October 20, 2011
Piyanjali de Zoysa
25 citations
Buddhist practices have been increasingly influencing psychotherapy. For over 20 centuries, Buddhism has been the religion of a majority of Sri Lankans. However, there is little documentation of the use of Buddhist practices in psychotherapy in Sri Lanka. This paper presents a case study in which Theravadan Buddhist mindfulness meditation and cognitive therapy practices were used in the...
Transcultural Psychiatry
July 2011
Simon Dein, Roland Littlewood
In this article we propose that schizophrenia and religious cognition engage cognate mental modules in the over-attribution of agency and the overextension of theory of mind. We argue similarities and differences between assumptions of ultrahuman agents with omniscient minds and certain ''pathological'' forms of thinking in schizophrenia: thought insertion, withdrawal and broadcasting, and...
Transcultural Psychiatry
April 1, 2011
Simon Dein
In this article I discuss my career in cultural psychiatry. I begin by examining the influence of my personal background on my interests in cultural psychiatry and religion and health. I then discuss my research, which has focused upon two areas: the cognitive and phenomenological parallels between religious experiences and psychopathological states, and relationships between biomedicine and...
Transcultural Psychiatry
September 1, 2010
Simon Dein
30 citations
This article examines the relationship between Judeo-Christian religious experience and psychopathology. It builds on William James's Varieties of Religious Experience and more specifically his discussions of self, agency and the subliminal. Contemporary research on Christian conversion, mysticism, and its relationship to psychosis and mental health and healing are discussed. Future themes for...
Transcultural Psychiatry
September 1, 2010
Gerard Leavey
Clergy in the UK continue to provide health and social care services. However, collaboration between mental health services and clergy may be problematic, particularly in the resolution of conflicting beliefs and therapeutic modalities. For example, belief in demonic possession and other supernatural causes of mental illness, which are contentious among secular medical practitioners, remain...
Transcultural Psychiatry
July 1, 2010
Mary V. Seeman
5 citations
This paper reflects the intersection of three cultures: the rave (all night dance party and use of the drug, Ecstasy) culture; the ward culture of an inpatient psychiatric program for First Episode Psychosis; the spirit healing culture of the Philippines. All three intersected in Toronto, Canada in the mid 1990s, as illustrated by the clinical case of a 19-year-old university student who was...
Transcultural Psychiatry
March 1, 2008
John Belanti, Mahendra Perera, Karuppiah Jagadheesan
64 citations
Near-death experiences (NDEs) include a set of subjective experiences encountered by people who were close to death or were faced with life-threatening situations. Reports have suggested that the phenomenology of NDE might differ across cultures. This article is aimed at providing an updated phenomenological perspective by comparing NDEs in a cross-cultural context. We compared the various...
Transcultural Psychiatry
March 2008
Brendan D. Kelly
Buddhist psychology is increasingly informing psychotherapeutic practice in the western world. This article: (a) provides a general background to Buddhist tradition; (b) outlines the central tenets of Buddhist psychology, with particular emphasis on the practice of meditation; (c) provides an overview of research into the effects of Buddhist practice on the brain; (d) outlines the relationships...
Transcultural Psychiatry
March 1, 2007
Joanna Teuton, Richard P. Bentall, Christopher F Dowrick
47 citations
A qualitative study, investigating the representations and explanatory models of ;madness' held by indigenous and religious healers, was undertaken in urban Uganda. Case vignettes of individuals with a diagnosis of a psychotic disorder were discussed by the healers in terms of phenomenology, causality, intervention and outcome. Indigenous healers primarily understood ;madness' as spiritual or...
Transcultural Psychiatry
March 2007
O F Aina, O O Famuyiwa
This article describes three cases of ;ogun oru' (nocturnal warefare), a condition reported in southwest Nigeria involving an acute night-time disturbance that is culturally attributed to demonic infiltration of the body and psyche during dreaming. Ogun oru is characterized by its occurrence, a female preponderance, the perception of an underlying feud between the sufferer's earthly spouse and...
Transcultural Psychiatry
December 1, 2006
Joan D Koss-Chioino
Based on studies of spirit healing, this article proposes a model of the process of ritual healing that is focused on the core components of spiritual transformation, relatedness and empathy. It describes the central role of spiritual transformation in healers from which emerges their capacity for relation and empathy. Many spirit healers, following a spiritual transformation, begin to exercise...
Transcultural Psychiatry
December 1, 2006
Goffredo Bartocci, Giovanni Giacomo Rovera, Nicola Lalli et al.
The study of the relationship between psychiatry and religion has become an issue of increasing importance for both research and clinical practice. This article presents the history of the R. M. Bucke Memorial Society for the Study of Religious Experience, established by Raymond Prince in Montréal in 1964 as one of the first scientific societies whose aim was to investigate those...