Sorry, my extended absence has generated a few concerned emails prodding to find out if I’m still alive. I had something in my stomach (probably giardia) and the treatment for it was promptly followed by the cold that I get that’s all my own, where I lose my voice, and then feel like crap for a week and a half. I’m finally back on my feet, although not a hundred percent, and trying to get back into the swing of research.
I’ve realized that this year I will miss clvrmnky’s 40th, my sister’s 30th, and my grandfather’s 90th. How much does that suck! Well, clvrmnky and I have decided to rally. His birthday is early in the midwinder bonanza, so we’re going to celebrate it at the end of the season with a “40th New Year’s Party”. Yay! I know that has nothing to do with Ghana or research, but it’s what’s making me happy right now. You’re all invited!
Anyway, here’s an anecdote. Today as I was walking down the road a woman with a bottle of water on her head and nothing covering her chest came up to me and started talking. She was speaking a mix of English and Twi, and she didn’t sound at all crazy. However, the type of nakedness she was displaying is a universal sign of being “mad” in Ghana. I was curious, but I couldn’t quite figure out what she was saying. She was the most coherent “mad” person that I’ve seen, though.
So I’m walking along, and these two guys stop us and start telling her to speak English. But then they change their track and start asking me if I don’t know she’s mad. I said that I didn’t know what she was and they became very offended, saying that people in Ghana don’t dress like that and basically that I should know better than to think that of Ghanaians.
I find it very interesting that “madness” takes this very particular form in Ghana. I was talking to a woman who told me that in a period of extreme duress she began to disrobe and try to leave the house (she was restrained by relatives). She said she could tell what she was doing but she couldn’t stop herself.
And lastly, here is a sober thought. I just found out yesterday that despite six years of public education, the maid at my house is unable to read, unable even to easily identify the names and sounds of the letters of the alphabet. I am now teaching her to read.
Filed under: Daily-Living Ghana
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Yay back!
I’m fascinated by this “mad” behaviour pattern, but I can’t quite put into words why. How is it that this particular compulsion gets encoded into people’s minds? I’ve always had the impression that, in North America at least, the presumption is that insane behaviour makes sense to the person even if it doesn’t to an outside observer, the difference being one of altered perception and cognition. Here, though, is a behaviour that apparently doesn’t even make sense to the person doing it, and yet they’re doing it anyway. Why? Because it’s what they’ve learnt that mad people do?
I have to say that the majority of the “mad” people that I see on a daily basis do not feel the need to disrobe – I do stipulate – MOST of them. However, I find this behaviour interesting, and wonder what was the motive behind it, attention seeking or psychotic behaviour. Many of the patients here do believe that they are not sick, and it is us – ie: the nurses, doctors and their families (those forunate enough to have one) are the ones that are “mad”. It is all about perception.
Glad you are back on your feet, we are working on the care package, and I think I have found a good book to send (that is not to heavy)
I used “mad” specifically because I don’t think that this is something that every mentally ill person in Ghana does, but it is a particular form of expression of one or more types of mental illness. I think that this behaviour is learned; it’s not necessarily attention seeking, although it might be. But I find it very interesting that there is a sort of recognizable behaviour that is both mentally ill and culturally specific. It’s kind of like eating a tub of ice cream when you’re depressed: people here don’t do that (there’s a lot of lactose intolerance, and also ice cream is expensive). But because I’ve never seen this sort of “madness” before, the specificity of its expression really stands out.
In the case of the woman I knew, I would say that she was angry without recourse, and so she took it out on herself. I don’t know to what extent that is generally the case with mad people. This particular form of madness is shunned: the men who intervened were quite insistent that I stop talking to the woman, and they were treating me as though I were extremely stupid, asking me if I knew where I lived and where I was going, offering to take me there in their car (!). So this particular form of madness is a sort of social suicide, and I think that social/physical suicide was what was on the mind of the person that I knew, and that is also how the people around her treated it.
This thread is making my brain itch, because I recall reading (or reading about) a cross-cultural survey of “madness” as it is understood by that culture.
That is, it discussed and compared the many and various cultural expressions of public insanity. Even madness might express itself in expected and culturally recognizable (but still socially disordering) ways.
But, I only got the itch, none of the details.