Unhealthy Spirits

When I saw the BBC News story "First, Forget About Witchcraft...." yesterday (Hicks, 2013), I thought that it was a perfect example of the issues in our first reading in Quest, "Culture and Mental Illness" (Hartmann, 2007, pp. 167 - 168), so I immediately emailed the link to myself as a reminder.

In this article, Celeste Hicks tells us the story of war-ravaged Chad's only psychiatrist, Dr Egip Bolsane, who is battling to help the psychologically assaulted people of his still desperately poor country, where there is not enough money for the numerous physical health problems, let alone mental health (2013). Moreover, as he tells Hicks, the common perception that psychological abnormality is in fact a symptom of possession by spirits rather than a health problem also makes it difficult for people to discuss such problems or to seek professional help.

Hick's account of Bolsane's story reminded me most of Hartmann's account of the situation in Algeria, where all sickness is likely to be seen as a symptom of possession by jinn, which is similarly not something that people want to admit to, which in turn makes it difficult for them to seek the professional medical help that they might urgently need.

This led me to wonder about the issues of spiritual beliefs and similar traditional ways of understanding the world be live in. I think that many people think that there is something good about what we might call traditional spiritual beliefs and practices, such as religious teachings, but I'm not so sure that I agree. The examples from Chad and Algeria seem to me to suggest that the traditional spiritual beliefs, which are wrong - there is zero or less evidence for the existence of any such things - are also harmful in their effects on individuals and society. Because of these false beliefs, individuals are, as Bolsane says, much less likely to seek the medical help that they need; worse, they are likely to be rejected by society, including their own families, who find their seriously disruptive behaviour impossible to cope with. This is bad for everyone, and it is a direct result of the false traditional spiritual beliefs of people's cultures. Spiritual beliefs, along with other traditional elements of culture, might be pretty and nice, but shouldn't we also care about things like truth and health, mental as well as physical, social as well as individual?

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Reference

Hartmann, P. (2007). Quest 2 Reading and Writing (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Hicks, C. (2013, September 14). First, forget about witchcraft.... . BBC News Health. Retrieved September 17, 2013 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-24037696