The construction of religious and cultural meaning in Egyptian psychiatric patient charts
This paper explores the use of religious symbols and metaphors in Egyptian psychiatric inpatient charts to portray psychiatric pathology and, by extension, the role that religious symbols play in constructing psychiatric illnesses. This represents a deconstruction of patient charts, assuming that th...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Taylor & Francis
2004
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| In: |
Mental health, religion & culture
Year: 2004, Volume: 7, Issue: 4, Pages: 323-347 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | This paper explores the use of religious symbols and metaphors in Egyptian psychiatric inpatient charts to portray psychiatric pathology and, by extension, the role that religious symbols play in constructing psychiatric illnesses. This represents a deconstruction of patient charts, assuming that the psychiatrist chooses aspects of family and patient discourse which best represent unexamined cultural ideas of person and illness, normality and abnormality. All of the psychiatrists writing the charts were Egyptian and shared much of the same cultural background with their patients, excluding their medical training. Therefore, while chart discourse is used to justify a psychiatric diagnosis, it is also the product of a shared cultural history; a tacit agreement about what constitutes a meaningful story. This paper focuses mainly upon discourse that has religious connotations, for the reason that these seemed to be more invested with cultural meaning than other delusional themes. These religious symbols and metaphors are interpreted in light of their symbolic associations with certain existential states, the family unit and with society as a whole. "The language of madness is not a pathology, a description of an isolated sickness, but commentary on patterns of relatedness and their interruptions, on the fantasies and defences that define the human project as an interpenetration of what Jacques Lacan (1968) calls "the Imaginary with the Real". (Glass, 1989, p. 6). |
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| ISSN: | 1469-9737 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Mental health, religion & culture
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1080/13674670410001719797 |