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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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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 

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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