Indigenous Traditions, Modernity, and Madness

2020 ◽  
pp. 185-227
Author(s):  
Shilpi Rajpal
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Traditional Medicine ◽  
Preliminary Investigation ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Medical Markets ◽  
Hindi Literature ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Circulation Of Knowledge

Emergence of the ‘mind sciences’ in vernacular Hindi literature was a variegated phenomena. Western medical ideas were sometimes amalgamated, segregated, filtered, and appropriated by the vaidyas and hakims according to the needs of the time. Certain key psychiatric concepts had long interesting afterlives while others could not survive. These hybrid practices reflect not only the wide circulation of knowledge but also the impulses of the medical markets that recast traditional medicine in a modern garb. This chapter is a preliminary investigation into the indigenous ways of dealing with and healing madness. The spread and dissemination of Western medical knowledge led to the reshaping of some of the Ayurvedic concepts of mental illness.

A Philosophical, Cultural, and Literary Critique of Mental Illness in Birago Diop’s “Sarzan”

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-37
Author(s):  
Adrien Pouille
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Nervous Breakdown ◽  
The Mind

This paper is another contribution to the long list of articles and book chapters written about Birago Diop's work, “Sarzan.” Unlike most if not all interpretations of the eponymous hero's mental illness, this article reads Sarzan's nervous breakdown as an invitation to services, which are radically different from the ones he is mandated by the French administration to perform, yet integral to the customs of his village. To many critics, the mental degradation witnessed in Sarzan, is an ancestral correction inflicted to Sarzan following his desacralization of rituals and sites sacred to his community. But however, legitimate this interpretation may be, it is quite limited in light of various forms of recuperative rituals practiced in traditional Africa to address and cure disturbances related to the mind.

The diary of a madman, seventeenth-century style: Goodwin Wharton, MP and communer with the fairy world

1986 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 503-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Porter
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind

SynopsisGoodwin Wharton (1653–1704) was a nobleman's son and a Whig MP who played no small part in English public life. His manuscript journal shows, however, that he also lived a bizarre secret life of the mind of a kind which, in later generations, would have led to his confinement as suffering from mental illness. Above all, through the offices of his medium and lover, Mary Parish, he entered into elaborate relations both with the fairy world and with God and His Angels. This paper examines our records of Wharton's consciousness

Decolonizing Medicine

2019 ◽  
pp. 239-262
Author(s):  
Alex Broadbent
Keyword(s):  
Traditional Medicine ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Cultural Influence ◽  
The West ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Mainstream Medicine ◽  
Medical Traditions

The phrase “traditional medicine” is commonly used to refer to medical traditions originating outside the West, and still practiced either as alternatives to or alongside Mainstream Medicine. Hard and dismissive attitudes to traditions with non-Western origins are obviously insensitive. It is clear that power and knowledge are intertwined. What counts as knowledge is partly determined by who has power. Moreover, medicine is clearly imbued with cultural influence. Yet if we reject medical relativism, we cannot accept that medicine is simply a cultural expression. We must consider which of two conflicting traditions, or two incompatible prescriptions, is correct (if either is). Medical Cosmopolitanism is a tool for negotiating the opposing temptations of excessive tolerance and dogmatism, and for understanding how one might “decolonize” medical knowledge. The chapter suggests that developments of the notion of decolonization can prevent a collapse into medical relativism, espousing “critical decolonization.”

scholarly journals The Impact of Cultural Values, Family Involvement and Health Services on Mental Health and Mental Illness

2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-126
Author(s):  
Anastasia Tarnovetskaia ◽  
Linda Hopper Cook
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Health Services ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Asian Indian ◽  
Family Involvement ◽  
Cultural Groups ◽  
Willingness To Seek Help ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Impact

This paper explores the impact of cultural values, the role of the family, access to and usage of culturally acceptable health services for three distinct Canadian cultural groups. Specifically the paper examines the mind/body/spirit connection, the cultural impact of formal or informal social support, as well as access and willingness to seek help in the context of mental health among Canadian Aboriginals, Chinese and Asian Indian cultures. Three diseases that have been documented only within Canadian Aboriginal, Chinese and Asian Indian cultures are also examined. Through using examples from three separate and very distinct cultures, this paper hopes to foster a greater cross-cultural understanding of mental health and mental illness.

The Psychological Aftereffects of Racialized Sexual Violence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cathy McDaniels-Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Slave Narratives ◽  
Antebellum South ◽  
Entire Life ◽  
After Effects ◽  
Runaway Slaves ◽  
The Mind

This chapter examines the psychological after effects of racialized sexual violence. Although few formal nineteenth-century records of mental illness, mental instability, or depression exist, written and oral slave narratives recount how “the entire life of the slave was hedged about with rules and regulations.” Samuel Cartwright, a well-known physician in the antebellum South, had a psychiatric explanation for runaway slaves, diagnosing them in 1851 as suffering from “drapetomania.” Classified as “a disease of the mind,” Cartwright defined drapetomania as a treatable and preventable condition that caused “negroes to run away.” Cartwright's published work established the foundation for “racism's historic impact” on black mental health. Indeed, Cartwright's pseudo-science, a potent mix of religion, pro-slavery politics, and medicine, forged a powerful connection between mental illness and race continued by subsequent generations of physicians and psychologists.

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