Mental Disorder in Rural Ghana

Abstract

This paper summarizes the main findings of two years' ethno-psychiatric field-work carried out in N.W. Ashanti throughout 1956 and 1957, and later to be published in full detail.The picture surrounding the rural field-worker is essentially different from that seen by psychiatrists in mental hospitals. In rural districts only homicidal patients are ever referred to a mental hospital, and then only from the police-magistrate's court. All other mental illness is regarded as super-naturally determined and hence outside the province of European medicine.