Search results for ‘Author:"coker elizabeth m."’ Sort:
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Religion, ethnicity, and community mental health: service provision and identity politics in an unplanned Egyptian community
- Author:
- COKER Elizabeth M.
- Journal article citation:
- Community Development Journal, 43(1), January 2008, pp.79-92.
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
Successful community mental health programs depend on strong social networks and cooperation between resource providers, both of which are complex products of local culture and history. The results of an ethnographic study of an unplanned urban neighbourhood in Cairo, Egypt emphasize the importance of the political, social and historical context to community service development. The informal nature of the community, characterized by migrants from different ethnic and religious groups and a relative lack of governmental services, produced a culture of service provision that indirectly serves to accentuate religious and ethnic tensions. The findings are relevant not only to the developing world, but also to community program development in large, multicultural urban centres anywhere.
The construction of religious and cultural meaning in Egyptian psychiatric patient charts
- Author:
- COKER Elizabeth M.
- Journal article citation:
- Mental Health Religion and Culture, 7(4), December 2004, pp.323-347.
- Publisher:
- Taylor and Francis
- Place of publication:
- Philadelphia, USA
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.