Search

Egyptian society is engaged in a culture-wide debate over definitions of abnormality, local constructions of which are rooted in ideas about the body and the soul in relation to society as a whole. This is reflected in the continuing recourse to religious healers or texts, as well as in heated debates over the moral, social, religious and legal status of religious healers, in particular the relatively recent and more orthodox "Qur'anic healers." The present study used a primarily qualitative analysis of Egyptian newspaper articles to explore media portrayals of this debate with a focus on how these contradictory cultural themes are situated and contested. The results show that psychiatric hegemony is reflected in media language that gives primacy to certain discourses over others, but that religious healing and religion in general exert an equal, if not more powerful influence on the form of these media portrayals. Different strategies used to negotiate the tensions between Qur'anic healing and psychiatry by those on both sides of the argument come across in the ways these arguments are portrayed in the media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychiatric stigma is a concept that is often used uncritically by policy-makers to explain the underutilization of professional psychiatric services in non-Western societies. Stigma, however, is a multi-determined process manifestations and effects of which cannot be viewed separately from the larger social and cultural context. The present paper presents the results of a qualitative study of psychiatric stigma in Egypt from the perspective of lay respondents. A vignette method was used to elicit judgments of social distance and qualitative responses to stories depicting psychosis, depression, alcohol abuse and a `possession state' from 208 respondents recruited through their places of work. The results indicated that while stigma does exist in Egypt, the form that it takes must be understood with reference to Egyptian notions of selfhood that locate behavioral disturbances in the intersubjective rather than intrapsychic realm. On the one hand, individual blame is diffused as responsibility for the illness and its cure is placed in the social, not personal (or biological) realm. On the other, behavioral disorders that threaten the social fabric of society are particularly stigmatized and often met with social rejection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The organizing goal of the present study was to analyze and understand the “discursive presentation” of the Egyptian psychiatric patient through the texts, or narratives, contained within the patient medical charts. It is argued that the medical record, as a written document blending overt medical imperatives with more unexamined cultural assumptions about self-hood and abnormality, is an unusually rich source of discursive data concerning the “cultural negotiations” implicit in the construction of the patient according to the two (often competing) worldviews represented by western biomedicine and traditional Egyptian culture. Psychiatry in Egypt is much more than a “foreign transplant”; to assume this is to deny the culturally constructed nature of western biomedicine and psychiatry, which have their roots in historical and cultural notions of self, society, the individual, and normality versus abnormality (Transcultural Psychiat. 35(3) (1998) 352). Egyptian psychiatry is the product of an ongoing active blending of two very different conceptualizations of these issues. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]