Social science & medicine (1982)
August 1, 2010
Victor Igreja, Beatrice Dias-Lambranca, Douglas A Hershey et al.
52 citations
In post-civil war Mozambique (2003-2004), a study of 941 adults assessed harmful spirit possession. Prevalence varied by severity: 18.6% of participants suffered from at least one harmful spirit, and 5.6% of those had two or more. Possessed individuals experienced greater health impairment compared to non-possessed individuals. The study used a combined quantitative-qualitative design and suggests that understanding local beliefs about spirit possession and its community prevalence is essential for designing culturally sensitive public health interventions.
Transcultural psychiatry
October 1, 2013
Ria Reis
37 citations
Children in parts of Africa use idioms of spirit possession and witchcraft to express and cope with social crises and traumatic stress. In Northern Uganda, haunting spirits allow children to articulate complex feelings about their precarious family and community situations. While local symbolic healing practices can help, obstacles such as generational gaps reduce their effectiveness. Witchcraft idioms sometimes heal the group but harm the accused child. These idioms reflect how children navigate the moral universe of postconflict communities, though they may also increase anxiety. Urgent interdisciplinary research is needed on the microprocesses leading to children being haunted or accused, including emotional and physiological effects.
Culture, medicine and psychiatry
September 1, 2020
Devon E Hinton, Ria Reis, Joop De Jong
17 citations
Among Cambodian refugees at a psychiatric clinic, ghost encounters are a central part of how trauma is experienced and expressed. Fifty-four percent of patients had been bothered by ghost encounters in the past month. The severity of being bothered by ghosts was strongly correlated with PTSD severity. Among those bothered by ghosts, 85.2% had PTSD, compared to 15.4% of those not bothered, an odds ratio of 31.8. Ghost visitations occurred in three states of consciousness: during full sleep (dreams), hypnagogia (sleep paralysis or hallucinations while falling asleep or waking), and full waking (hallucinations, visual aura, chills, or leg cramps).