interpretations and perceptions associated with indigenous psychotherapeutic practices of...

Interpretations and Perceptions associated with Indigenous Psychotherapeutic Practices of Traditional Healers in Ayetoro Township, Ogun State, Nigeria

A PhD Proposal Presentation

August 2012

Supervisors:Professor Akin Odebunmi (Department of Psychology, University of Ibadan)Dr. Abiodun Gesinde (Department of Psychology, Covenant University)

Akomolafe, Adebayo Clement

(B.Sc., M.Sc.)Clinical Psychology

Department of PsychologySchool of Human Resource

DevelopmentCollege of Development Studies

Covenant University

Greetings & Acknowledgements

My deepest acknowledgements are reserved for my wife and life-force, ‘Lali’, whose

presence is a reminder that the ‘world’ is always more mysterious, more beautiful,

and more enchanted than our most inspired attempts to understand ‘it’.

I have been aided, counseled and supported in ways too far-reaching to articulate

here by Professor Aize Obayan, Professor Akindele Odebunmi and Dr Abiodun

Gesinde, Professor Augustine Nwoye, Professor Molefi Asante (USA), Professor

Chinua Achebe (whose comments on a related work of mine were more than enough

to encourage my present trajectories of questions), Professors Jack Whitehead and ,

Professor Kenneth Gergen (TAOS Institute) and Manish Jain of Swaraj University,

India.

I dedicate this work to the intellectual visionaries in and out of the academia, who

are accessing new landscapes of alterity and possibilities; whose subversive visions

are challenging the political orthodoxy of order, hegemony and the heteronormative

articulations of success; who are learning to ‘fail’ into new ways of being and

knowing – whether this be deemed legitimate or not.

Presentation Outline

Introduction

Statement of Problem

Aim and Objectives of Study

Research Questions

Literature Review

Research Methodology

Expected Contributions

Conclusion

References

Introduction


The monoculture of the mainstream

• This study problematizes the monoculture of mainstream mental health service delivery in non-Western contexts, which has historically marginalized alternative conceptions of mental wellbeing due to its hegemonic claim to universal legitimacy. This singular controlling influence over competing meta-narratives of mental health has helped silence/delegitimize the rich practices of indigenous mental health practitioners, therefore impoverishing perspectival appreciation of the construct of mental illness and stifling access to plural frameworks of healing.

Interpretations and Perceptions associated with Indigenous Psychotherapeutic Practices of Traditional Healers


Pluralizing Mental Health Frameworks

• The problem of the monoculture of Eurocentric psychotherapies in non-Eurocentric contexts is further complicated by the severely limited provision of facilities dedicated to the ‘treatment’ of mental illness. Bolstered by the resurgence of a critical tradition in clinical psychology praxis, there is a need to stimulate new evaluations of the construct of mental wellbeing and illness along plural, mythopoetic-cultural lines (Akinyela, 2002), and thus enable the emergence of multiple healing cosmologies and practices. The critical emergence of plural frameworks of healing will enable new cultural solutions to mental health service delivery that do not depend on any single framework.


Aims and Objectives of the Study

Investigating ‘other’ practices of ‘healing’

• 1) Perform a phenomenological investigation of a select number of indigenous traditional healers to describe variants of Yoruba epistemology, ontology, belief systems, practitioner-based techniques, aetiologies and local approaches to mental health and mental distress.

• 2) Employ narrative methods such as unstructured in-depth interviews/life histories, observational tools, and the collection of site artefacts to investigate the experiences and subjective accounts of the clients/former clients of these traditional healers in a bid to understand their grounded perspectives about influence and efficacy of indigenous therapies – as well as the commensurability of Western mental health systems to local livelihoods.


Aims and Objectives of the Study

Creating an ethnic portrait of wellness

• 3) Investigate the perceptions of practitioners in mainstream mental health services about the outcomes and techniques of indigenous practices.

• 4) Employ the convenience of video and pictures to create a mural that will complement the text in the „final‟ report, and employ non-academic means of knowledge dissemination to help revitalize these traditions in community of concern – thus providing alternatives in healthcare for communities marginalized by the hegemony of Eurocentric psychotherapy


Research Questions

How? Why? When? What?

• 1) What do the traditional healers in Ayetoro Township understand the nature of traditional healing to be? How do traditional healers perceive and valorise ‘normality’ and/or wellbeing?

• 2) How do the traditional mental health practitioners approach mental ‘health’ and mental ‘illness’ and what epistemological, ontological and situational constructs inform their approaches, techniques and evaluations of successful intervention?

• 3) What kinds of psychological problems do people bring to the attention of traditional healers in Ayetoro Township?


Research Questions


• 4) How do the practitioners explain the basis for the emergence of psychological problems in their clients? What techniques, rituals and performances are enacted by traditional healers in the ‘treatment’ of mental distress or the restoration of distressed persons into society? What procedures do the practitioners engage in to effect healing in their clients?

• 5) What are the peculiarities of the setting or context under which the practitioners live and work?

• 6) How do „subjects‟ of these indigenous techniques story their experiences and what informs their preferences for these therapeutic technologies?


Research Questions


• 7) How do practitioners in mainstream mental health services conceive the outcomes of indigenous? How do these indigenous perspectives of mental health, as articulated by traditional practitioners and persons who patronize them, relate with Eurocentric orthodoxies on the aetiology, course and treatment of mental illness?


Literature Review

Literature Review: Studies

“We Africans need to come back to ourselves…”

• Ethnopsychotherapeutic practices have long been recognized as existing side by side with ‘orthodox’ therapies (Ovuga, Boardman, & Oluka, 1999)

• Unrecognized, many indigenous healing methods, studied by a growing number in the academia unsatisfied with mainstream psychotherapy, continue to serve locals across the globe (Raguram, Venkateswaran, Ramakrishna, & Weiss, 2002; Abbo, 2009; Kabir, Iliyasu, Abubakar, & Aliyu, 2004).

• The Igbo of Eastern Nigeria also have an elaborate cosmology that implicates healing and illness, deviance and wellbeing. Nwoko (2009, p.37) states that ‘in Igbo perception, every ailment comprised the invisible, spiritual or supernatural origin and visible or natural origins.


Literature Review: Theoretical Framework


• Social constructionism and critical discursive psychology. Social constructionism is concerned with the ways knowledge is framed, while critical discursive psychology is a rising trend that advocates a deconstruction of the so-called tenets of Eurocentric psychology. Indeed, critical psychology implies that we see psychology, hitherto unfettered by any ethnic affiliation as a result of its pretensions to universality, as Eurocentric psychology – giving opportunities for the articulation of thrillingly new and parallel ways of responding to the questions: what does it mean to be ‘human’? What does it mean to well?


Proposed Research Methodology


Phenomenological research

• This study employs a qualitative research design since the topic, assumptions, questions and objectives of the project are not appropriate for positivist and quantitative approaches. Qualitative research is naturalistic research, and is particularly adapted to the exploration of „why‟ and „how‟ questions, which seek the subjective meaning behind experiences within multiple contexts.



Phenomenological research

Setting

The study will be situated in the south-western part of Nigeria, specifically in Ayetoro Township, in Yewa North Local Government Area, Ogun State, which is mostly populated by indigenous Yoruba communities. Ayetoro, established around 1813, is one of the founding cites that formed Ogun State in the mid-1970s. It has more than four government secondary schools and many private schools; it serves as the administrative headquarters for Yewa North Local Government, and is home to many prestigious traditional healers – hence its selection. Additionally, Ogun State is home to one of Nigeria‟s few psychiatric centres.


PRM (2): Things to know about QRM

Ethnographic study employing grounded theory data analysis

Research Design

This study employs a qualitative, phenomenological research design (inspired by a social constructivist paradigm) and adaptations of phenomenological thematic analysis procedures as data analysis tools. Phenomenology is a major form of qualitative research. It is employed by qualitative researchers who are concerned about process, not outcome – which is usually a story – and who seek to describe the subjective experiences of people. The operative word in phenomenological research is ‘describe’. The aim of the researcher is to describe as accurately as possible the phenomenon, refraining from any pre-given framework, but remaining true to the facts. Phenomenologists are concerned with understanding social and psychological phenomena from the perspectives of people involved. Interpretations and Perceptions associated with Indigenous Psychotherapeutic Practices of

Traditional Healers

PRM (3): Setting


Participants

My ‘portrait’ of the mental health system in Ayetoro and the culture that informs their indigenous practices will be derived from my interactions with multiple populations:

a) Traditional Healers/Indigenous Mental Health Practitioners in Ayetoro Town

b) Clients of Traditional Healers

c) Clinicians at the Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital


PRM (4): Research Design


Sampling

The most popular form of sampling in qualitative research is purposive or theoretical sampling. The probability sampling techniques employed in quantitative research are rarely appropriate when applied to qualitative research (Marshall, 1996). The purposive sampling method is a non-probability sampling method, and has thus been selected in this study since it is appropriate to the direct goals of identifying primary participants within the multiple populations – or looking for those who have had experiences relating to the phenomenon to be researched.

In addition, I shall use snowball sampling. Snowballing is a method of expanding the sample by asking one informant or participant to recommend others for interviewing.


PRM (4): Research Design


Sample Size

The sample size cannot be determined prior to engaging the concerned populations. However, since it is already clear the kinds of people I expect to meet, it is possible to have a rough estimate about the number of participants one might expect to meet in the sites. In this case, it is expected that I shall be able to interview approximately seven well-established practitioners in Ayetoro town, not less than 10 clients, and not less than 10 mainstream psychotherapists at the Aro Neuropsychiatric Hospital in Abeokuta, Ogun State.


PRM (5): About Ethnography


Data-Gathering Methods

This phenomenological study of practitioner-based worldviews about mental health in Ayetoro and the lived experiences of participants in the culture will derive its data (narratives, observations, and quotations) based on the research questions I have earlier earmarked. The data collection methods are:

i) Unstructured in-depth phenomenological interviews (personal narratives),

ii) observational methods (video, pictorial and rich descriptions),

iii) focus group discussions, and

iv) memoing (a qualitative research method-inspired way of accounting for researcher bias) from field notes Interpretations and Perceptions associated with Indigenous Psychotherapeutic Practices of

Traditional Healers

PRM (5): About Ethnography


Data Explicitation

Data explicitation will be performed using content explicitation protocols, which involve coding qualitative data (that is, the transcribed conversations generated from the interviews, focus group discussions and even field notes made by the researcher) in a spiral fashion, building categories that exemplify elements of a narrative, constructing themes from categories and then arriving at a representative „theory‟ or „big picture‟ about the data.1) Bracketing and phenomenological reduction.

2) Delineating units of meaning.

3) Clustering of units of meaning to form themes.

4) Summarising each interview, validating it and where necessary modifying it.

5) Extracting general and unique themes from all the interviews and making a composite summary.




• This study is timely because it directly addresses the marginalization of indigenous voices on mental health and employs research methods consistent with indigenous traditions for expression in order to propose counter-hegemonic measures aimed at the revitalization and reclamation of the said traditions. Its connections to the rich traditions of mental health decolonization, popularized by Professor Lambo in Nigeria and Linda Smith in New Zealand, recommend it has a study worth supporting. The study of these non-mainstream approaches to therapy weaves together streams of wisdom and history about being, personhood, relating with others, wellbeing, the colonial moment, deviation and experience – thus opening up new vistas for emergent and participatory enactments of wellbeing.


Conclusion

Thank you

References

(Full bibliographic content provided in Proposal; the following is merely displayed here for presentation purposes)

Causes of mental illness (Traditional healers) - Types of mental illness among Yoruba tribe of Nigeria . (2010). Retrieved September 22, 2010, from Progressive Individual Resources, Inc.: http://pirimn.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=19&Itemid=34

Abbo, C. (2009). Profiles and outcome of traditional healing practices for severe mental illnesses in two districts of Eastern Uganda. Retrieved September 22, 2010, from Makarere University: http://diss.kib.ki.se/2009/978-91-7409-590-6/thesis.pdf

Abdi, A. A. (2010). Globalization, culture and development: Perspectives on Africa. Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the Social Sciences, 2(1), 1-26.

Adegoke, A. A. (2008). Factors influencing health beliefs among people in South West, Nigeria. African Research Review, 2(1), 177-197.

Adichie, C. (2009, July). Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story. Retrieved September 26, 2010, from TED: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html

Afolayan, S. O. (2010). Pragma-criticism: An Afrieurocentric reaction to the Bolekaja Agenda on the African novel. The Journal of Pan African Studies, 3(10), 85-103.

Agara, A. J., Makanjuola, A. B., & Morakinyo, O. (2008). Management of perceived mental health problems by spiritual healers: a Nigerian study. Afr J Psychiatry, 11, 113-118.


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