L Swartz
Biographic Data
| ID | 2211 |
|---|---|
| NAME | L Swartz |
| GIVEN NAMES | L |
| FAMILY NAME | Swartz |
| SIGNATURE | SWARTZ L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stellenbosch University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1741-5897 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 229 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 639 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 229 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
From shared values through creative refusal and contemporary pragmatism
As part of a larger study, we explore a hospice service delivered in Cape Town as part of a leading hospice organization. The hospice service was established during the apartheid era but is committed to inclusion and celebrating South African diversity. We conducted an organizational ethnography at a day hospice service in a formerly excluded, ‘Black’, part of Cape Town, using observation and interview methods. We found that the concept of cultur…
Bargaining with the body
South Africa is often viewed as a safe refuge for LGBTQ+ individuals, yet the reality for queer African migrants is marked by insecurity and exclusion. Despite strong constitutional protections, migrants from highly homophobic contexts continue to face discrimination and marginalisation. This article examines how gay Zimbabwean migrants experience and navigate violence, discrimination and marginalisation across their move to South Africa. As part…
Between relief and estrangement
Exploring the use of translation technologies to overcome language barriers in mental healthcare
Language barriers in healthcare continue to pose major challenges to equitable, high-quality care, particularly in mental health settings where communication is central to diagnosis, therapeutic alliance, and treatment planning. Translation technologies, including machine translation applications, offer potential solutions, but their real-world usability in mental health care remains underexplored. This cross-country qualitative study examined th…
We have been completely immersed in frustration and trauma’
Migrants assuming caregiving roles for other migrants require care themselves. We report on how migrants in South Africa navigate the dual responsibilities of caregiving and self-care. 15 semistructured interviews were conducted with migrant caregivers between January and June 2023. Data were thematically analysed and interpreted through a narrative lens. Findings highlight the critical role migrant caregivers play in offering support to their co…
Disability and Spatial Exclusion Under Covid-19 in South Africa
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed a range of existing inequalities. People with disabilities are disadvantaged worldwide and frequently denied spaces within personal and public contexts. This article focuses on the environmental and functional experiences of people with disabilities and service providers in South Africa during the pandemic. Lockdown conditions resulted in diminished spaces and loss of agency, consequent to increased dependence on fam…
Adoption process in South Africa
Some old South Africans represented
Identity Development in Transracial Adoptive Families in South Africa
This research reports on the attitudes towards, experiences, and practices of identity development of transracial adoptive families in South Africa. Identity development is a significant developmental task for everyone. Integrating the many aspects of identity is particularly challenging for adopted children, especially those who are adopted transracially. Being part of a transracial adoptive family does not only impact on adoptees, but it also i…
Identity Development in Transracial Adoptive Families in South Africa
This research reports on the attitudes towards, experiences, and practices of identity development of transracial adoptive families in South Africa. Identity development is a significant developmental task for everyone. Integrating the many aspects of identity is particularly challenging for adopted children, especially those who are adopted transracially. Being part of a transracial adoptive family does not only impact on adoptees, but it also i…
Relationships Within the Transracially Adopted Child’s Biological Family in South Africa
Socio-economic and cultural circumstances in South Africa impact on why people place children for adoption, and affect the attitudes towards the biological family, as well as communication and contact between the adoptive and biological families. No research on contact between adoptive and biological families of transracial adoptees has been conducted in South Africa. This exploratory research investigated the attitudes towards biological family …
Redefining ‘family’
Transfeminine women (assigned male sex at birth and identifying with a feminine gender identity) are at risk for intersectional stigma related to their gender, sexual orientation, and other parts of their social identities (including age, class, and race). These layered stigmas can result in increased physical and mental health concerns related to physical and emotional violence, substance use, high risk sexual behaviour and HIV exposure. Social …
Uncovering multi-level mental healthcare barriers for migrants
This research elucidates the multifaceted, systemic challenges hindering equitable mental healthcare provision for migrants. It posits that sweeping policy reforms are imperative, advocating for the implementation of strategies, such as increasing the availability of language services, enhancing healthcare providers' capacity, and legal framework and policy change to be more inclusive. The findings substantially contribute to scholarly discourse …
HIV and gender identity expression among transfeminine people in the Western Cape, South Africa – a thematic analysis of data from the HPTN 071 (PopART) trial
Our findings are amongst the first exploratory and descriptive data of transfeminine people in South Africa. We show how transfeminine people navigate fluid gender identities that could pose a challenge for accessing and utilizing HIV services that are currently set up for transgender individuals or MSM. More work needs to be done to understand and respond to the diverse and shifting ways people experience their gender identities in this high HIV…
Migration and mental health care in South Africa
Access to mental healthcare for migrants is a global problem, with many challenges and barriers, including the issue of language discordance. Most research on this topic comes from well-resourced countries such as those in Europe, Northern America, and Australasia despite the fact that most migration occurs from poorer contexts, such as many in Africa, into more closely situated countries. As an introductory part of a broader international study,…
Psychiatrists’ experiences of involuntary care in South Africa
Providing for people with psychosocial conditions in crisis is a complex and controversial endeavour that has gained significant attention over the past decade. This increased focus is driven by global calls to reduce coercion, including by the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, who interpret Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in General Comment 1 to advocate fo…
Intersectionality and embodiment
While viewing an intersectional analysis of inequality as fundamental, we published an opinion in this journal (Watermeyer & Swartz, 2023) pointing to how, in practice, it can be (mis)applied in a manner which underestimates the complexity brought by disability's infinite diversity in forms of embodiment.This observation in no way implies that disability, or any other marker of identity for that matter, is somehow intrinsically more significant t…
Something about us with us
Despite the fact that disability makes up the largest minority in the world, training in psychology in South Africa today does not give viable mention to the challenges associated to living with disability. Indeed, disability studies and psychology have had an awkward relationship for various reasons, resulting in lack of engagement with disability rights issues in the field of South African psychology. The article discusses what we see as the hi…
They are not even called by name
Addressing the challenges outlined in the study requires collaborative efforts between government, psychiatric institutions, private security companies, SGs and MHCPs. The establishment of clear roles, implementation of comprehensive formal training, psychosocial support and improved working conditions, particularly in-house employment, higher pay, increased employee rights and job security, are needed
“I’ve Really Let Go of the Language Thing.”
In South Africa, transracial adoption could result in the loss of birth language for the adopted child. Language is an important part of racial and cultural identity in South Africa. Not being able to speak a local African language causes Black African transracial adoptees to be judged by outsiders. Lack of fluency in an appropriate language limits social circles associated with biological family and makes reunion more complex. Many transracial a…
The Care Dependency Grant for children with disabilities in South Africa
For people with disabilities, appropriate social protection interventions can contribute to breaking the cyclical relationship between poverty and disability and may improve social inclusion. In South Africa, a national social assistance programme provides 'social grants' to individuals on the basis of poverty, age, or disability. These grants have been extensively studied but there has been little investigation into the Care Dependency Grant, de…
To queue or not to queue
BACKGROUND: A key feature of South Africa's state health care strategy since 1994 has been the development and expansion of services towards integrated health care at primary health care level. Within the new system, emphasis has been on the integration of patients with mental health care needs with other patients where multiple health conditions and needs would be addressed simultaneously. As part of a larger study into mental health care in a p…
Transracial adoption practice in South Africa
Transracial adoption (TRA) represents the largest number of non‐disclosed adoptions in South Africa but remains under researched. This exploratory research investigates practices in the Western Cape, via semi‐structured interviews with adoption social workers and magistrates. Thematic analysis of data revealed the following themes: knowledge and attitudes towards the legal/policy framework of TRA; influences on placement decisions; preparation be…
Documentary analysis of the legal and policy framework of transracial adoption in South Africa
Transracial adoption was legalized in South Africa through legislative reform as South Africa moved into a post‐apartheid era of non‐racialism. Transracial adoption offers one option of placement for Black children in need of alternative care. However, adoption continues to face obstacles to implementation, including cultural obstacles which impact on placement of Black African children. This paper reports on adoption statistics on national adopt…
Dissociation and spirit possession in non-western countries
Transcultural Psychiatry in South Africa
Anorexia nervosa as a culture-bound syndrome
Ah, but the whiteys love to talk about themselves’
This article reports on an interdisciplinary and collaborative educational module prepared for fourth‐year Psychology and Social Work students at two higher education institutions in the Western Cape, South Africa. The aim of the module was to provide students with the opportunity to experience learning across the boundaries of institution, discipline, language, race and class, and to provide the team with data to enhance understanding of how stu…
Political repression and children in South Africa
Conceptualising the psycho‐emotional aspects of disability and impairment
Recent feminist critics of the social model of disability have pointed towards a danger that disability studies may give relatively little attention to personal and emotional aspects of disablist oppression and impairment. We argue for consideration of the centrality of the distortion of personal and psychic boundaries as a key aspect of oppressive relational dynamics surrounding disability. Within the observer the disturbing psychic evocations o…
Cyborg anxiety
Disabled people have a history of being viewed as not entirely human. In the age of spare part surgery and increasing sophistication of drugs, there are increasing concerns about what it means to be human, and, in particular, in what distinguishes people from machines. These concerns have clear resonance with anxieties about disability, and with disabled people being seen as not human. Oscar Pistorius is a disabled athlete whose wish to compete a…
Culture and Mental Health in the Rainbow Nation
The notion of culture in psychiatry in South Africa is chang ing. Cultural relativism was used as a justification for oppression by the previous regime, with some researchers therefore de-emphasising difference. Currently interest in di versity is growing. The racial integration of services poses challenges for culturally appropriate care. Community-based care, apparently a way of meeting challenges of cultural differ ence, presents other difficu…
Imbalances in the knowledge about infancy
Over 90% of the world's infants are born in low‐income or “developing” countries, and these countries bear a disproportionate burden in terms of health and social problems. In this article we compare the contributions of richer and poorer countries to knowledge about infancy. We surveyed articles on infancy from 12 international journals dealing with psychological aspects of childhood and infancy and found that 94% of articles surveyed were writt…
The Reproduction of Racism in South African Mental Health Care
In an attempt to avoid reproducing apartheid ideology, some South African psychologists have tended to minimize cultural differences and emphasize universalism. Relativism and universalism in practice, though, are closely intertwined as an analysis of some local transcultural psychiatry literature shows. Similarly, racist and nonracist mental health care occur together in certain contexts. The development of less racist mental health care in Sout…
The paradoxical use of interpreting in psychiatry
"What Can We Learn From First-Person Narratives?" The Case of Nonfatal Suicidal Behavior
Responding to the limitations of dominant biomedical quantitative approaches to suicide research, scholars have called for qualitative research documenting first-person narratives of suicide to gain access to the "true experts." This raises questions about what we can learn about suicide from first-person narratives. In this article, we critically examine the practice of analyzing first-person narratives of nonfatal suicidal behavior to make trut…
Providing Sex Education to Persons with Learning Disabilities in the Era of HIV/Aids
Research suggests that disabled people may be at increased risk for HIV infection, yet are excluded from HIV prevention campaigns. Historically people with learning disabilities have been constructed as either being asexual or sexually uninhibited, and sex education considered to be unnecessary or potentially harmful. This article reports on findings of a qualitative study exploring the challenges expressed by participants who provide sex educati…
Images of culture and mental illness
This article considers ways in which the relationship between culture and mental illness is presented in some prominent South African psychiatric literature. We argue that ‘culture’ is often chosen for study for pragmatic reasons, and because the term has considerable currency both in South Africa and in mainstream psychiatry. Four major approaches situated within both interpretive and positivist models are discussed. Common to all of these is a …
Oscar Pistorius and the melancholy of intersectionality
The alleged shooting by Paralympian and Olympian athlete Oscar Pistorius of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp has led to strong reactions worldwide. Scholars in the field of disability studies have expressed shock and disappointment in response both to the death itself and to its implications for the representation of disability. In South Africa in the wake of the death of Ms Steenkamp, much has been made both by critics of Pistorius and by his defe…
Ethical and social dilemmas in community‐based controlled trials in situations of poverty
All psychological and social research presents ethical dilemmas, many of which centre around the difficulties which flow from the power imbalances between those conducting the research and the research respondents or participants. Issues of power are magnified in research undertaken in contexts of poverty, and there is a burgeoning literature on ethical issues in research in developing countries. In this article, we augment the existing literatur…
A concept over-burdened
The political and social transformations taking place in South Africa have given rise to a mood of optimism regarding the speed and extent of the changes that are possible in a short space of time. In the context of limited language resources for the delivery of health care, the role of the interpreter has particular currency. However, interpreters' multiple roles in health care contexts have been extensively and, at times, controversially descri…
Xhosa-Speaking Schizophrenic Patients' Experience of Their Condition
This study investigates the experience of 10 Xhosa-speaking schizophrenic patients attending a community psychiatry clinic in Cape Town. Drawing on social constructivist theory, and its critique of psychiatric constructions of psychopathology and culture, the study explored psychiatric patients' construction of their experience of their condition. In face-to-face open-ended interviews, patients were asked to describe their experience of their con…
Professional constructions of a 'lay' illness
A thing full of stories
The experience of epilepsy is profoundly culturally mediated and the meanings attributed to the condition can have a great impact on its social course. This qualitative study used Kleinman's Explanatory Model framework to explore traditional healers' perspectives on epilepsy in an urban township in Cape Town, South Africa. The healers who participated in the study were Xhosa-speaking, had experience caring for patients with epilepsy, and had not …
Theorising beyond the individual
Adherence to antiretroviral therapy, while often conceptualised as an individual or community-level concern, needs to be understood in the context of political and historical developments that have characterised many resource-constrained societies. This article identifies some of these dimensions of antiretroviral therapy adherence in South Africa and outlines the implications for community health psychology in taking this perspective. Using the …
An unruly coming of age
Task orientated nursing in a tuberculosis control programme in South Africa
Disability and the problem of lazy intersectionality
Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality has been used to include different dimensions of difference and exclusion. We suggest here, however, that intersectional analyses may paradoxically further exclude discussions of the impact of disability in interaction with other factors. We outline three ways in which intersectionality may be incorrectly used. First, there is selective intersectionality where only certain forms of exclusion are considered.…
Moving Beyond Text-and-Talk in Qualitative Health Research
Qualitative researchers are increasingly making use of multiple media to collect data within a single study. Such approaches may have the potential to generate rich insights; however, there are also potential methodological challenges in simultaneously analyzing data from multiple media. Using three case studies from our work with women who had recurrent breast cancer in South Africa, we explore four challenges of using multiple media to collect …
He doesn’t understand that he’s struggling with the way I felt’ – university students, psychosocial disability and disclosure in the Western Cape, South Africa
Despite there being much research on students with more visible disabilities, this is not the case with students with invisible disabilities such as psychosocial disabilities – especially in university postgraduate settings. Students with psychosocial disabilities have the decision to disclose their status to their research supervisors and this has implications on their relationship. This was a qualitative study interviewing 15 postgraduate stude…
Harré's Social Being
From Operationism to Cultural Design
Aspects of B.F. Skinner's development into a social engineer are examined with particular consideration of the link between his later work and his reliance on operationism. Special emphasis is given to his manner of argument. Analysis of this style provides a perspective not accessible through attempts to locate Skinner's work in terms of traditions of thinking
Images of culture and mental illness
This article considers ways in which the relationship between culture and mental illness is presented in some prominent South African psychiatric literature. We argue that ‘culture’ is often chosen for study for pragmatic reasons, and because the term has considerable currency both in South Africa and in mainstream psychiatry. Four major approaches situated within both interpretive and positivist models are discussed. Common to all of these is a …
Issues for cross-cultural psychiatric research in South Africa
Is thin a feminist issue
Anorexia nervosa as a culture-bound syndrome
Talk about talk
Illness negotiation
Transcultural Psychiatry in South Africa
Some Comments on the Draft Ethical Code for South African Clinical Psychologists
This article responds to the challenge implicit in the words ‘provisional draft’ appended to the title of the Ethical principles of Clinical Psychologists proposed for the SAICP by Steere and Wassenaar. An ethical code should be understood not only as a device for protecting and aiding the public but also as a way in which clinical psychology defines itself as a profession. It may even be the case that this second aspect of the code is the more p…
Political repression and children in South Africa
The politics of black patients' identity
Hidden dimensions of power and resistance in the translation process
The Reproduction of Racism in South African Mental Health Care
In an attempt to avoid reproducing apartheid ideology, some South African psychologists have tended to minimize cultural differences and emphasize universalism. Relativism and universalism in practice, though, are closely intertwined as an analysis of some local transcultural psychiatry literature shows. Similarly, racist and nonracist mental health care occur together in certain contexts. The development of less racist mental health care in Sout…
Cree Indian healing practices and western health care
Integration or marginalisation? Clinical psychology as a strategy for dealing with psychosocial issues in a South African neurosurgery ward
Biomedicine has been criticised for its failure to take adequate account of psychosocial issues. One attempt to address this has been to employ clinical psychologists in general hospital wards. In order to examine this phenomenon, four cases referred to the first author while she was an intern clinical psychologist working in a Neurosurgery ward are reported and discussed. In addition, interviews were conducted with two clinical psychologists and…
Psychology and Epidemiology
Issues arising in a joint enterprise of psychology and epidemiology are discussed. Technical difficulties include: case definition; population definition; definition of onset; repeated admissions; çase-to-case spread; social factors; and the social production of symptoms. The potential marginalization of psychosocial issues in epidemiology is discussed in terms of the prevailing western medical model, biomedicine. The disease—illness distinction …
On the edge
Professional constructions of a 'lay' illness
Mothers' Reports of Behaviour Problems in Three Groups of South African Preschool Children
Sixty mothers of preschool children from African, Malay, and White groups in Cape Town, South Africa, were interviewed about the presentation, understanding, and management of behaviour problems. Overall symptom prevalence was similar across groups; results coincided with international findings. Differences were related in the main to material circumstances. Certain problems viewed as signifying disorder by White mothers-such as rocking and thumb…
Epilepsy and Psychosocial Adjustment
It has become increasingly acknowledged that the social and psychological consequences of leaving epilepsy may be more debilitating than the seizures themselves. Recently these psychosocial aspects of epilepsy have become the emphasis of much research, and different models for understanding psychosocial consequences have become evident. In this article recent research has been reviewed and has been classified as belonging either to a medical mode…
Reports of the experience of epilepsy in a rural South African village
Culture and Mental Health in the Rainbow Nation
The notion of culture in psychiatry in South Africa is chang ing. Cultural relativism was used as a justification for oppression by the previous regime, with some researchers therefore de-emphasising difference. Currently interest in di versity is growing. The racial integration of services poses challenges for culturally appropriate care. Community-based care, apparently a way of meeting challenges of cultural differ ence, presents other difficu…
Xhosa-Speaking Schizophrenic Patients' Experience of Their Condition
This study investigates the experience of 10 Xhosa-speaking schizophrenic patients attending a community psychiatry clinic in Cape Town. Drawing on social constructivist theory, and its critique of psychiatric constructions of psychopathology and culture, the study explored psychiatric patients' construction of their experience of their condition. In face-to-face open-ended interviews, patients were asked to describe their experience of their con…
Post-partum depression and the mother-infant relationship in a South African peri-urban settlement
BACKGROUND: Post-partum depression in the developing world has received little research attention, and its association with disturbances in the mother-infant relationship is unknown. AIMS: To determine the prevalence of post-partum depression and associated disturbances in the mother-infant relationship in Khayelitsha, a South African peri-urban settlement. METHOD: The mental state of 147 women who had delivered two months previously was assessed…
Psychology (173 works) · Sociology (142 works) · Medicine (126 works) · Political science (105 works) · Psychiatry (89 works) · Social Psychology (60 works) · Disability Rights and Representation (52 works) · Nursing (50 works) · Gender Studies (47 works) · Qualitative research (46 works)