Discursive practice and the negotiation of psychiatric pathology in Egypt

Abstract

Modern biomedical psychiatry is the product not only of scientific enterprise but also of the progressive secularisation and medicalisation of moral life in the West (Jimenez, 1987). Psychiatry is an evolving cultural product. Its diagnostic categories represent pathologies rooted in Western notions of self, identity, normality and abnormality (Gaines, 1991). Psychiatric practice in Egypt, on the other hand, is the product of two different and often incompatible world views, namely Western psychiatry and Egyptian concepts of self, identity, normality and abnormality. The task of the psychiatrist in Egypt is to negotiate symptoms and diagnoses in a way that is sensitive to the demands of these two competing cultural streams. Analysis of this process provides a unique view of the ways in which culture can have an impact on professional psychiatry in any society or ethnic context.