The mental patient liberated from his chains, is now considered as a patient resorting to a specialized branch of medicine. So, he has entered into the rigid and compelling structures of the modern medicine. The better he will adapt himself to the medical world, the more easily he will be considered as cured. This approach has the advantage to present madness with a securing image of a disease as plain as the somatic ones. On the other side, it deprives madness of its questioning aspects: relations with social structures, culture habits, problems of the personal and specific experience gained by each patient, questions of borders between mental illness and "normal" behaviours. Mental practice in african societies gives a new approach toward mental illness, demonstrating the value of a collective action through symbolic forms, in the traditional social environment. This approach may give precious indications to be taken into account by the occidental psychiatry.

Africa↗

PubMedDate not supplied

[Psychotic masked depression or black mask for depression].

We have used as depression criteria those of Pichot and Hassan, described during the Sint-Moritz Symposium in 1973 on masked depression. According to their clinical experience in Zaïre and Senegal, the authors consider the possibility that the "bouffée délirante" (acute psychotic reaction), frequent in black Africa, is in fact a manifestation of depression. They remind the five criterias of Pichot and Hassan, i.e.: 1 degree evidence of depression symptoms; 2 degrees a background and a particular underlying personality; 3 degrees evolutional characteristics; 4 degrees familial antecedents and hereditary factors; 5 degrees the response to antidepressive treatment. They present ten cases of acute psychosis: five from Zaïre and five from Senegal. These ten patients have been successfully treated with antidepressive drugs imipramine type, without any neuroleptic drugs; the outcome has always been a rapid remission. Some socio-cultural references are described; it permits to better comprehend the psychological frame of African people. An attempt to psychodynamically interpret the results ends the article.

Adolescent↗