Cultural Beliefs, Traditional Healing, and Help Seeking Pathways for Psychosis in Pakistan A Medical Anthropology Informed Scoping Review

Abstract

Psychosis is a mental illness that is more than just medically based because it is affected by culture, religion, family relations, social stigma, and tradition. In Pakistan, all of these aspects have a very large impact on how people perceive odd behavior, whether or not they choose to get help, and where they go first for help.

OBJECTIVES

The objective of this review is to analyze current literature on cultural and religious conceptions of psychosis, traditional healers, spirituality, family involvement, and social stigma. It will also explore access to mental health facilities by patients in Pakistan. This review is intended to find areas where better cooperation can be created between the biomedical sector and the community taking into account their cultural differences.

METHODS

This review paper includes five research studies on Pakistan from the working literature list which are Farooqi (2006), Zafar et al. (2008), Khan et al. (2023), Rathod et al. (2023). The results were grouped using several considerations such as context of the study, population of interest, methods of investigation, models that describe the problem, methods of healing, help seeking process, barriers and implication of the results. The absence of relevant information about search process, duplication, and screening and exclusion criteria from the working document made it impossible to include PRISMA-ScR flow diagram into this review.

RESULTS

The studies indicate that psychosis could be understood from different angles such as biomedical, psychosocial, religious and supernatural. Traditional treatment and faith healing might be practiced before, along with or instead of psychiatric treatment. Several barriers such as influence of the family, stigma, and lack of knowledge, economic reasons, and poor accessibility of health services, structural problems and failures of referral might cause the delay in seeking help. However, it should be noted that cultural or religious aspects are not always a barrier for help seeking, sometimes they can be beneficial.

CONCLUSION

In Pakistan, help seeking for psychosis may be influenced by culture-specific considerations and may incorporate multiple traditional techniques. A good method of dealing with the problem should consist of both scientific treatment of mental disorders and the improvement of the communication between people who suffer from psychosis and their families. In addition, the method should define the procedure of referral to community and spiritual healers where applicable. More research needs to be done in order to see how the above approach operates in different circumstances (urban/rural).

Keywords: psychosis; schizophrenia; cultural beliefs; traditional healing; stigma; help seeking; medical anthropology.