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Mental Disorder in Rural Ghana

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2018

M. J. Field
M. J. Field*
Affiliation:
Sometime Anthropologist to the Gold Coast Government Sometime of the Maudsley Hospital and Barrow Hospital, Bristol
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Extract

This paper summarizes the main findings of two years' ethno-psychiatric field-work carried out in N.W. Ashanti throughout 1956 and 1957, and later to be published in full detail.

The picture surrounding the rural field-worker is essentially different from that seen by psychiatrists in mental hospitals. In rural districts only homicidal patients are ever referred to a mental hospital, and then only from the police-magistrate's court. All other mental illness is regarded as super-naturally determined and hence outside the province of European medicine.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Journal of Mental Science , Volume 104 , Issue 437 , October 1958 , pp. 1043 - 1051
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1958 

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References

Carrothers, J. C., The African Mind in Health and Disease, 1953, Geneva, W.H.O. Google Scholar
Field, M. J., J. Ment. Sci., 1955, 101, 826.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Idem , ibid., Religion and Medicine of the Ga People, Part I, Chap. II. 1937. Oxford.Google Scholar
Idem , ibid., Part II, Chap. I. Google Scholar
Idem , “Ashanti and Hebrew Shamanism”, Man 1958, 58, 7.Google Scholar
Margetts, E. L., of Methari Hosp. Nairobi, in a spoken communication.Google Scholar
Pidoux, C. L., Chargé de Mission Ethnopsychiatrique, Rabat (Maroc), in a spoken communication.Google Scholar
Smartt, C. G. F., of Merembe Hospital, Tanganyika, in a spoken communication.Google Scholar
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