Reclaiming Agency, Ensuring Survival: Disabled Urban Ghanaian Women's Negotiations of Church and Family Belonging

This paper draws from a narrative ethnography of women members of disabled people's organizations (DPOs) in Accra, Ghana. Through recounting their autobiographical stories, elicited in multiple interviews, it explores how they navigate tensions among disability status, material survival, family belonging and religious participation Finding themselves neither fully acknowledged in family roles nor as religious community members, disabled women struggle to carve out spaces of self-determination and well-being between families and religious institutions, and between their developing aspirations and the circumscribed options available to them at the intersections of poverty, gender and disability. Women draw from multiple experiences, communities and discourses to interpret disability in complex and varied ways, not solely within the "moral models" often attributed to African cultures. Utilizing three biographical narratives from a 2003-2004 qualitative study, this paper shows how urban Ghanaian women with disabilities work to redefine themselves as social participants, and indeed as fully human, through engagement with religion. Implications for disability activism are discussed in the paper's conclusion

"In the same soup": Marginality, vulnerability and belonging in life stories of disabled Ghanaian women.

"In the same soup": Marginality, vulnerability and belonging in life stories of disabled Ghanaian women

Reflechi twòp—Thinking Too Much: Description of a Cultural Syndrome in Haiti’s Central Plateau

A rich Haitian ethnopsychology has been described, detailing concepts of personhood, explanatory models of illness, and links between mind and body. However, little research has engaged explicitly with mental illness, and that which does focuses on the Kreyòl term fou (madness), a term that psychiatrists associate with schizophrenia and other psychoses. More work is needed to characterize potential forms of mild-to-moderate mental illness. Idioms of distress provide a promising avenue for exploring common mental disorders. Working in Haiti\u27s Central Plateau, we aimed to identify idioms of distress that represent cultural syndromes. We used ethnographic and epidemiologic methods to explore the idiom of distress reflechi twòp (thinking too much). This syndrome is characterized by troubled rumination at the intersection of sadness, severe mental disorder, suicide, and social and structural hardship. Persons with thinking too much have greater scores on the Beck Depression Inventory and Beck Anxiety Inventory. Thinking too much is associated with 8 times greater odds of suicidal ideation. Untreated thinking too much is sometimes perceived to lead to psychosis. Recognizing and understanding thinking too much may allow early clinical recognition and interventions to reduce long-term psychosocial suffering in Haiti\u27s Central Plateau