The construction of religious and cultural meaning in Egyptian psychiatric patient charts

Bibliographic Data

ID19504303
AuthorsElizabeth M Coker (Schlumberger (Ireland), corresponding author)
Year2004
Volume7
Issue4
Pages323-347
Publication date2004-12-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueMental Health Religion & Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1367-4676 • E-ISSN: 1469-9737
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13674670410001719797
OpenAlexW1966953031
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited43

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 Glass JM 1989 Private terror/public life: Psychosis and the politics of community Ithaca Cornell University Press [Google Scholar], p. 6)

Epistemology · Existentialism · Normality · Psychiatry · Psychoanalysis · Psychotherapist · Sociology · Medicine · Mental Health and Psychiatry · Mental Health Treatment and Access · Philosophy · Psychology · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub