From Powerlessness to Control: Psychosis, Spirit Possession and Recovery in the Western Desert of Egypt

Authors

  • M. A. Rashed Dr Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed Postdoctoral Research Fellow Department of Psychiatry University of Pretoria Pretoria South Africa

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/hcs.2015.194

Keywords:

Schizophrenia, Psychosis, Jinn, Islam, North Africa, Spirit possession, Recovery

Abstract

This article explores an aspect of the cultural modulation of recovery in psychosis. It begins with the idea that recovery hinges on the ability of subjects to relate to their distressing experiences in ways that expand rather than diminish agency.  Based on fieldwork in the Dakhla oasis of Egypt and subsequent analysis, it is argued that interpretations of psychosis as spirit possession offer a broader range of intentionality than biomedical interpretations and therefore broader possibilities of relating to psychotic states. Modes of relating to spirits may take active or passive forms, the former consistent with the recovery goal of symptom control. Factors constitutive of the active, agency-expanding mode of relating include: the nature of spirits; the values and beliefs of the subject; the broader cultural/religious discourses which may make it either more or less likely for the subject to achieve the desired state of control over symptoms.

Author Biography

M. A. Rashed, Dr Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed Postdoctoral Research Fellow Department of Psychiatry University of Pretoria Pretoria South Africa

Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Pretoria. He obtained his doctorate in humanities and mental health from University College London and masters in philosophy of mental disorder from King's College London. He qualified as a medical doctor from Cairo University and trained in psychiatry in the UK. Dr Rashed's research interests include concepts of mental disorder and culture, spirit possession, psychosis, and psychiatric ethics.

Select Publications

Book Chapters

2015       Culture and Mental Health (IN PRESS) Psychology: Themes and Variations. Ed. J Hassim. Cengage Publishing

2014       Islamic Perspectives on Psychiatric Ethics. Oxford Handbook of Psychiatric Ethics. Eds. J Sadler, B Fulford, CW van Staden. Oxford University Press

Editorial

2011        Religious Experience & Spirituality in Cultural Psychiatry (2nd author with S. Dein).

Journal of the World Association of Cultural Psychiatry Special Issue 6(1): 1-2

Peer Reviewed Articles

2015       A Critical Perspective on Second-Order Empathy in Understanding Psychopathology: Phenomenology and Ethics. Theoretical Medicine & Bioethics (IN PRESS)

2015       Can Psychiatry Distinguish Social Deviance from Mental Disorder? Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology (IN PRESS)

2013       Culture, Salience & Psychiatric Diagnosis: Exploring the Concept of Cultural Congruence & its Application. Philosophy, Ethics & Humanities in Medicine 8(5)

2013       Talking Past Each Other: Conceptual Confusion in ‘Culture’ and ‘Psychopathology’. South African Journal of Psychiatry 19(1): 12-15

2013       Psychiatric Judgements across Cultural Contexts: Relativist, Clinical-Ethnographic, & Universalist-Scientific Perspectives. Journal of Medicine & Philosophy 38(2): 128-148

2010       Religious Experience and Psychiatry: Analysis of the Conflict and Proposal for a Way Forward. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 17(3): 185-204  

2011        The Egyptian Revolution: A Participant’s Account from Tahrir Square. Anthropology Today 27(2): 22-27.

References

l-Gohary, M. (1977) ‘Elm al-folklore wal mo’taqadat al-sha’beyya. Cairo: Madbouly Press

Al-Issa, I. (1995). The illusion of reality or the reality of illusion: Hallucinations and culture. British journal of psychiatry 166:368-373.

Al-Najjar, M. (1995). Al-Tib Al-Nabawi Bayn Al-Teb Al-‘elmi wal Teb Al-Sha’bi. Al-Funun Al Sha’bia 46:30-55.

Al-Rowais, N., E. Al-Faris, A. Mohammad, M. Al-Rubkan, & H. Abdulghani (2010). Traditional Healers in Riyadh Region. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 16(2):199-204.

Anthony, W. (1994). Recovery from Mental Illness. In Readings in Psychiatric Rehabilitation. W. Anthony and LeRoy Spaniol, eds. Pp.521-538. Boston: Boston University Press.

Boddy, J. (1988). Spirits and Selves in Northern Sudan: The Cultural Therapeutics of Possession and Trance. American Ethnologist 15(1):4-27.

Boddy, J. (1989). Wombs and Alien Spirits. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press.

Boddy, J. (1994). Spirit Possession Revisited: Beyond Instrumentality. Annual Review of Anthropology 23:407-434

Bonney, S. & T. Stickley (2008). Recovery and mental health: a review of the British Literature. Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing 15:140–153

Bourguignon, E. (1979). Psychological Anthropology. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Castillo, R. (1994). Spirit Possession in South Asia, Dissociation or Hysteria? Part 1: Theoretical Background. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 18:1-21.

Cohen, E. (2007). The Mind Possessed: The Cognition of Spirit Possession in an Afro-Brazilian Religious Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Coker, E. (2009). Claiming the Public Soul: Representations of Qur’anic Healing and Psychiatry in the Egyptian Print Media. Transcultural Psychiatry 46(4):672-694.

Crapanzano, V. (1977). Introduction. In Case Studies in Spirit Possession. V. Crapanzano and V. Garrison, eds. Pp. 1-40. London: John Wiley and Sons.

Crapanzano, V. (1980). Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Crossley, M.

Crapanzano, V. (2000). Introducing Narrative Psychology: Self, Trauma and the Construction of Meaning. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press.

Deuraseh, N. (2009). Using the Verses of the Holy Qur’an as Ruqyah (Incantation): The Perception of Malay-Muslim Society in Kelantan and Terengganu on Ruqyah as an Alternative way of Healing in Malaysia. European Journal of Social Sciences 9(3):448-456.

Edgerton, R. & A. Cohen (1994). Culture and schizophrenia: the DOSMD challenge. British journal of psychiatry 164:222–231.

El-Kholy, H. (2004). A Discourse of Resistance, Spirit Possession among Women of Low-income Cairo. In Health and Identity in Egypt. H. Sholkamy and F. Ghannam, eds. Pp. 21-41. Cairo: AUC Press.

Farkas, M. (2007). The vision of recovery today: what it is and what it means for services. World Psychiatry 6:68-74.

Gellner, E. (1992). Postmodernism, Reason, and Religion. London: Routledge.

Giles, L. (1995). Sociocultural Change and Spirit Possession on the Swahili Coast of East Africa. Anthropological Quarterly 68(2):89-106.

Good, B. (1994). Medicine, Rationality, and Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hirschkind, C. (2009). Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. Columbia: University Press.

Hopper, K. (1991). Some old questions for the new cross-cultural psychiatry. Medical anthropology quarterly 5(4):299-330.

Hopper, K. (2004). Interrogating the meaning of culture in the WHO international studies of schizophrenia. In Schizophrenia, Culture and Subjectivity. J. Jenkins and R. Barrett, eds. Pp.62-86. Cambridge: University Press.

Hopper, K., G. Harrison, A. Janca, & N. Sartorius (2007). Recovery from Schizophrenia: An International Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press.

Jablensky, A., N. Sartorius, G. Ernberg, M. Anker, J. Cooper, R. Day, & A. Bertelsen (1992). Schizophrenia: Manifestations, incidence and course in different cultures. Psychological medicine 20:1-97.

Jackson, M. (2005). Existential Anthropology: Events, Exigencies, And Effects Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Jenkins, J. (1991). Anthropology, Expressed Emotion, and Schizophrenia. Ethos 19(4):387-431.

Jenkins, J. & E. Carpenter-Song (2005). The new paradigm of recovery from schizophrenia: Cultural conundrums of improvement without cure. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 29:379–413.

Jenkins, J., E. Milton, E. Carpenter, J. Floersch, & M. Sajatovic (2005). Subjective Experience of Recovery from Schizophrenia-Related Disorders and Atypical Antipsychotics. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 51:211-227.

Kleinman, A. (1987). Anthropology and psychiatry. British journal of psychiatry 151:447-454.

Kleinman, A. (1988). The illness narratives. New York: Basic books.

Lambek, M. (1988). Spirit Possession/Spirit Succession: Aspects of Social Continuity among the Malagasy Speakers in Mayotte. American Ethnologist 15(4):710-731

Lambek, M. (1989). From Disease to Discourse: Remarks on the Conceptualisation of Trance and Spirit Possession. In Altered States of Consciousness and Mental Health: A cross-cultural perspective. C. Ward, ed. Pp.36-61. Newbury Park, London: Sage Publications.

Leamy, M., V. Bird, C. Le Boutillier, & M. Slade (2011). Conceptual framework for personal recovery in mental health. British Journal of Psychiatry 199:445-452.

Lewis, I. (1971). Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study of Spirit Possession and Shamanism. Penguin: Harmondsworth

Lieberman, J., R. Drake, L. Sederer, D. Perkins, & S. Stroup (2008). Science and Recovery in Schizophrenia. Psychiatric Services 59(5):487-496.

Masquelier, A. (2002). From Hostage to Host: Confessions of a Spirit Medium in Niger. Ethos 30(1/2): 49-76.

Mattingly, C. (1998). Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McIntosh, J. (2004). Reluctant Muslims: Embodied Hegemony and Moral Resistance in a Giriama Spirit-Possession Complex. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10(1):91-112.

Morsy, S. (1978). Sex Roles, Power, and Illness in an Egyptian Village. American Ethnologist 5: 137-150.

Morsy, S. (1993). Gender, sickness and healing in rural Egypt: ethnography in historical context. Boulder: Westview press.

Padwick, C. (1924). Notes on the Jinn and the Ghoul in the Peasant Mind of Lower-Egypt. Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 3(3):421-446.

Phillips, J. (2003). Psychopathology and the Narrative Self. Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 10(4): 313-328.

Placido, B. (2001). 'It’s all to do with words’: An Analysis of Spirit-Possession in the Venezuelan Cult of Maria-Lionza. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7(2):207-224.

Rasmussen, J.(1995). Spirit-Possession and Personhood among the Kel-Ewey Tuareg. Cambridge: University Press.

Roberts, G, & P. Wolfson(2004). The rediscovery of recovery. Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 10:37-48.

Schrank, B. & M. Slade (2007). Recovery in psychiatry. Psychiatric Bulletin 31:321-325

Sengers, G.(2003). Women and demons: cult healing in Islamic Egypt. Leiden: Brill.

Sharp, L. (1994). Exorcists, psychiatrists, and the problems of possession in northwest Madagascar. Social Science and Medicine 38(4):525-542

Shepherd, G., J. Boardman & M. Slade (2008). Making Recovery a Reality. London: Sainsbury Centre.

SLAM & SWLSTG (2010). Recovery is for All. Hope, Agency and Opportunity in Psychiatry. Position Statement by Psychiatrists. London: SLAM/SWLSTG.

Winkler, H. (1933/2009). Ghost Riders of Upper Egypt: A Study of Spirit-Possession. Cairo: AUC Press.

WHO (2002). Mental health global action programme. Online: http://www.who.int/mental_health/media/en/265.pdf

Downloads

Published

2015-12-17

Issue

Vol. 8 No. 2 (2015): Horizons of Health

Section

Articles

License

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. The Author retains copyright in the Work, where the term “Work” shall include all digital objects that may result in subsequent electronic publication or distribution.
  2. Upon acceptance of the Work, the author shall grant to the Publisher the right of first publication of the Work.
  3. The Author shall grant to the Publisher and its agents the nonexclusive perpetual right and license to publish, archive, and make accessible the Work in whole or in part in all forms of media now or hereafter known under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License or its equivalent, which, for the avoidance of doubt, allows others to copy, distribute, and transmit the Work under the following conditions:
    1. Attribution—other users must attribute the Work in the manner specified by the author as indicated on the journal Web site;
    with the understanding that the above condition can be waived with permission from the Author and that where the Work or any of its elements is in the public domain under applicable law, that status is in no way affected by the license.
  4. The Author is able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the nonexclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the Work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), as long as there is provided in the document an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
  5. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post online a prepublication manuscript (but not the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version of the Work) in institutional repositories or on their Websites prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work. Any such posting made before acceptance and publication of the Work shall be updated upon publication to include a reference to the Publisher-assigned DOI (Digital Object Identifier) and a link to the online abstract for the final published Work in the Journal.
  6. Upon Publisher’s request, the Author agrees to furnish promptly to Publisher, at the Author’s own expense, written evidence of the permissions, licenses, and consents for use of third-party material included within the Work, except as determined by Publisher to be covered by the principles of Fair Use.
  7. The Author represents and warrants that:
    1. the Work is the Author’s original work;
    2. the Author has not transferred, and will not transfer, exclusive rights in the Work to any third party;
    3. the Work is not pending review or under consideration by another publisher;
    4. the Work has not previously been published;
    5. the Work contains no misrepresentation or infringement of the Work or property of other authors or third parties; and
    6. the Work contains no libel, invasion of privacy, or other unlawful matter.
  8. The Author agrees to indemnify and hold Publisher harmless from Author’s breach of the representations and warranties contained in Paragraph 6 above, as well as any claim or proceeding relating to Publisher’s use and publication of any content contained in the Work, including third-party content.

Revised 7/16/2018. Revision Description: Removed outdated link.