Category: Article

Digital Commentary Activities to Manage Mental Health and Identities Among Young South African Women and Girls (13-24) Living With(Out) HIV: Content and Thematic Analysis with Sociological Frameworks

By SunHa Ahn

This study, grounded in sociological principles, aims to provide a nuanced understanding of how young South African women and girls (YSAWGs) around HIV or sexual health or sexual activities, which are not easy to openly discuss in South African societies, use digital space in terms of their mental health or emotional management. This study was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic and explored YSAWG’s utilisation of Springster, a digital platform encompassing the digital commentary activities of socially marginalised voices, data collection spanned four months, yielding 135 stories. Through content analysis, the study quantified the frequency of repetitive words in these comments and identified main themes. These digital phenomena emerged as alternative substituting for the paucity of public school or (mental) health services, as well as the deficits of in-person intimate relational support, especially, among those who are struggling to seek non-judgemental peers or mutual relationships to navigate their emotional challenges in their life journey of HIV, sexual practices, and relevant health issues. This implies the need for educationally interactive processes in YSAWGs’ mental health, which have been epistemologically neglected since the apartheid period. Given the social and digital divided environments in South Africa, this demonstrates digital health practices’ potential for managing sexual health or practices for young women. However, there are mitigating risks to them, lessening the benefits, which means the urgent necessity of systematic interventions.

Read the full article here.

Decolonizing play: Rediscovering and revitalizing traditional play practices in post-colonial context

By Euis Kurniati and Sadick Akida Mwariko

This study examines the decolonization of play through the rediscovery and revitalization of traditional play practices in the post-colonial era. Through a comprehensive literature review, the research examines the historical suppression of indigenous play forms and their contemporary resurgence. The research highlights the cultural significance of these traditional practices, emphasizing their role in identity formation and social cohesion. Findings suggest that traditional play practices are integral to cultural heritage and offer substantial benefits when integrated into modern education, particularly in early childhood education frameworks. This study advocates for a paradigm shift towards a culturally responsive pedagogy that respects and incorporates indigenous knowledge. To achieve effective decolonization, educators, policymakers, and communities must collaborate in developing educational frameworks that honor and integrate diverse cultural traditions. This approach will not only preserve cultural heritage but also enhance educational equity and inclusivity. The revitalization of traditional play practices represents a significant step towards a more culturally aware and equitable educational environment, contributing to a richer and more inclusive early childhood education experience.

Read the full article here.

Mapping Mental Well-Being in India Initial Reflections on the Role of Psychiatric Spaces

By Clément Bayetti, Sushrut Jadhav and Sumeet Jain

This paper explores how two different sites—a psychiatric department and a community mental health programme embedded in a district hospital in India—construct their own peculiar understanding of mental well-being and recovery. Focusing initially on the nature of the discourse and practice emerging from a psychiatry department, this article demonstrates how members of the psychiatric profession in India are socialised into a conception of well-being narrowly defined by an absence of symptoms. It highlights how such notions emerge from the intersection existing between global paradigms such as “evidence-based medicine” and psychiatry’s “technological paradigm”. The authors argue that such conceptions of well-being can in turn be considered as both the articulation and operationalisation of a neoliberal capitalist ideology in which the hospital turns into a socially credited market where people’s “broken minds” can be fixed through the administration of psychotropic drugs, and through which recovery is narrowly conceptualised as paid employment. While such understanding may increasingly appears to fulfil the expectations of various social classes within Indian society by providing them a gateway to a form of global citizenship, this paper also shows how such notions feed into a state sponsored agenda of cost cutting public health care resources, thus impacting upon the well-being of both patients and professionals. This analysis also traces the ways in which this medicalised understanding of well-being evolves as these constructions of well-being diffuse out into wider society and become embedded into the national community mental health programme. In doing so, the paper explores ways in which such understanding may be reappropriated by people suffering from mental ill health and their communities, and the role that this plays in their personal and collective recovery.

Read the chapter here,

Dhis and Dhāt: Evidence of Semen Retention Syndrome Amongst White Britons

By Sushrut Jadhav

The uncritical application of western psychiatric concepts in non-western societies resulting in culturally invalid psychiatric syndromes, have been extensively documented. Such instances are considered ‘category errors’. In contrast, ‘reverse category errors’ although theoretically postulated, have never been empirically demonstrated. Diagnostic criteria of an established South Asian culture specific neurosis, Dhāt syndrome, were deployed by a psychiatrist of South Asian origin, amongst 47 white Britons in London, UK, presenting for the first time with a clinic diagnosis of ICD-9 Depressive Neurosis (Dysthymic Disroder, ICD-11). The proceedure yielded a new disorder, Semen Retention Syndrome. Based on narrative accounts and quantitative scores on the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, the evidence suggests that a significant subset of white British subjects diagnosed with Dysthymic Disorder, may in fact be expressing a psychological variation of a previously unknown local White British somatisation phenomena labelled Semen Retention Syndrome. Anxiety and depressive symptoms presented by this subset of subjects were primarily attributed to a core irrational belief and a cognitive error centered around misunderstood concepts of semen physiology. Consequently, the undue focus on mood idioms by both white British patients and their health professionals, leads to a mistaken diagnosis of Mood Disorder, and results in incorrect treatment. The implications of this ethnocentric mode of reasoning raises concerns about existing concepts in psychiatric phenomenology and for official international diagnostic classificatory systems. The paper concludes by arguing that category errors in both directions are instances of cultural iatrogenesis, and underscore the importance of a culturally valid psychiatry.

Read the article here.

Psychiatric stigma across cultures: Local validation in Bangalore and London

By Mitchell G. Weiss, Sushrut Jadhav, R. Raguram, Penelope Vounatsou & Roland Littlewood

Public responses to depression have a powerful effect on patients’ personal experience of illness, the course and outcome of the illness, and their ability to obtain gainful employment. Mental illness-related stigma reduction has become a priority, and to be effective, it requires innovative and effective public mental health interventions informed by a clear understanding of what stigma means. Based on Goffman’s formulation as spoiled identity, local concepts of stigma were validated and compared in clinical cultural epidemiological studies of depression in Bangalore, India, and London, England, using the EMIC, an instrument for studying illness-related experience, its meaning, and related behaviour. Similar indicators were validated in both centres, and the internal consistency was examined to identify those that contributed to a locally coherent concept and scale for stigma. Qualitative meaning of specific features of stigma at each site was clarified from patients’ prose narrative accounts. Concerns about marriage figured prominently as a feature of illness experience in both centres, but it was consistent with other indicators of stigma only in Bangalore, not in London. Although stigma is a significant issue across societies, particular manifestations may vary, and the cultural validity of indicators should be examined locally. Analysis of cultural context in the narrative accounts of illness indicates the variation and complexity in the relationship between aspects of illness experience and stigma. This report describes an approach following from the application of cultural epidemiological methods for identifying and measuring locally valid features of stigma in a scale for cultural study, cross-cultural comparisons, and for baseline and follow-up assessment to monitor stigma reduction programmes.

Read the article here.

Manual Scavenging in India: The Banality of An Everyday Crime

By Shiva Shankar and Kanthi Swaroop

Manual scavenging is the practice of ‘manually cleaning, carrying, disposing of, or otherwise handling, human excreta in an insanitary latrine or in an open drain or pit’, and its existence is a crime of genocidal proportions. The vast majority of people forced into this degrading occupation are women from Dalit castes. The Government of India has outlawed the practice through two Acts of 1993 and 2013, yet it continues everywhere in the country. This essay argues that the persistence of this crime is a consequence of the criminal indifference of a casteist society, and that resistance to it has largely been the heroic effort of the victims alone.

Read the full essay here.

Decolonisation of Education Research, Policy-making, and Practice in Central Asia: The Case of Tajikistan

By Sarfaroz Niyozov and Stephen A. Bahry 

This chapter reviews the challenges facing educational research and knowledge production, in the independent post-Soviet Central Asia through examination of the case of Tajikistan. The chapter revisits issues discussed in Niyozov and Bahry (2006) on the need for research-based approaches to with these challenges, taking up Tlostanova’s (2015) challenge to see Central Asian educational history as repeated intellectual colonization, decolonization, and recolonization leading her to question whether Central Asians can think, or must simply accept policies and practices that travel from elsewhere. The authors respond by reviewing Tajikistan as representative in many aspects, if not all particulars, of the entire region. Part one of the review describes data sources, analyses, and our positionalities. Part two reviews decolonisation in comparative, international, and development education and in post-Soviet education. Part three describes education research and knowledge production types and their key features. Thereafter, the authors discuss additional challenges facing Tajikistan’s and the region’s knowledge production and link them to the possibilities of decolonisation discourse. The authors conclude by suggesting realistic steps the country’s scholars and their comparative international education colleagues may take to move toward developing both research capacity and decolonisation of knowledge pursuits in Tajikistan and Central Asia.

Read the article here.

The Cultural Origins of Western Depression

By Sushrut Jadhav

Focusing on the British cultural vocabulary of guilt, fatigue, energy, stress and depression; this paper argues that such vocabularies have their own unique histories and meanings; deeply embedded, in this instance, within “white British and western European” institutions. Predicated on a western epistemology, these constructs developed in response to prevailing concerns at different periods in western history; but are now assumed to be universal natural entities that await further scientific research and investigation. The cross-cultural validity of depression as a universal disorder is therefore dubious and needs an extensive re-examination.

Read the article here.

Are hospitals collateral damage? Assessing geospatial proximity of 2000 lb bomb detonations to hospital facilities in the Gaza Strip from October 7 to November 17, 2023

By Dennis Kunichoff, David Mills, Yara Asi, Sawsan Abdulrahim, Bram Wispelwey, Osama Tanous, A. Kayum Ahmed, Weeam Hammoudeh, Nadine Bahour, Mary T. Bassett, and P. Gregg Greenough.

After attacks in Israel led by Hamas militants on October 7, 2023, Israel launched a major military campaign in the Gaza Strip that has featured an unprecedented scale of destruction. This has included the use of highly destructive weapons in a densely populated area. Mark-84 bombs (M-84s) are 2000 lb air-dropped explosive munitions with the capacity to damage infrastructure and kill or cause severe injury hundreds of meters away. This study examines the proximity of M-84 bomb detonations to hospital infrastructure in the Gaza Strip. This article combined geospatial data on hospital locations across the Gaza Strip with maps of the locations of M-84 bomb craters between October 7 and November 17, 2023, published by CNN and New York Times. This study then measured and summarized the proximity of the bomb craters to hospitals across the territory. This article identified 592 M-84 bomb craters. Of the 36 hospitals across the Gaza Strip, 25% (n = 9) had at least one bomb crater within the lethal range (360 m) and 83.3% (n = 30) within the infrastructure damage and injury range (800 m) of their facilities. The shortest distance of a bomb crater from a hospital was 14.7 m. Two hospitals had as many as 23 and 21 bomb craters within 800 m of their facilities and one hospital had seven bomb craters within 360 m. Thirty-eight M-84 bombs were detonated within 800 m of hospitals in the Israeli military defined evacuation zone. Given the known blast effect of these M-84 bombs, the impact from the bomb detonations near hospitals likely killed and injured people in and around the hospital area, which could include civilians and hospital staff, and likely damaged hospital infrastructure. The results of this study suggest indiscriminate bombing in dangerous proximities to hospital infrastructure, which is afforded special protection under international humanitarian law (IHL)

Read the article here.

Unbearable suffering: mental health consequences of the October 2023 Israeli military assault on the Gaza Strip

By Hanna Kienzler, Gwyn Daniel, Weeam Hammoudeh, Rana Nashashibi, Yasser Abu-Jamei, and Rita Giacaman.

The onslaught on Gaza is leading to catastrophic psychological consequences which will not be limited to the short term and to those directly affected, but will have long-term, intergenerational effects.

This commentary argues that to understand trauma responses among Gazans, we need to go beyond individual illness and, instead, link the biomedical sphere with the political sphere through the concept of social suffering and, thereby, expose the socio-political conditions of life and the collective trauma-inducing nature of the Israeli military occupation and repression.

Addressing these complex trauma responses requires approaches that bring together the political, social and personal-level components of mental health with a focus on three factors: safety and allyship; the right to agency and acknowledgement, accountability and reparations.

Read the article here.

    Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

    Up ↑