Use of traditional and alternative healers by psychiatric patients: A descriptive study in urban South Africa

Abstract

This study investigates the pattern of use of traditional and alternative healers among psychiatric patients in Nelson Mandela Metropole. An interview schedule was applied to 254 subjects at six sites, enquiring about consultations with traditional and alternative healers in the past year. Multivariate analysis was performed to determine predictors of consultation. Overall, 78 (31%) of respondents had consulted a healer in the past year. The ethnic distribution was: 156 (61%) Black, 53 (21%) Coloured (Mixed Race), 42 (17%) White and three (1%) Indian. The male to female ratio was 119 (46.85%):135 (53.14%). The healers gave no advice about psychiatric medication to 48 (61.5%) of consulters, 23 (29.5%) were told to continue their medication, four (5.1%) told to stop, and one (1.3%) told to stop and restart later. In multivariate models, predictors of consultation were being Black and of lower education. Although 45 (58%) of the consulters indicated that medical treatment was more helpful than the healer’s, 45 (58%) intended to consult again. Overall, 22% of consulters reported abuse by the healer.

Sociodemographic Characteristics of Traditional Healers and Their Knowledge of Noma: A Descriptive Survey in Three Regions of Mali

“…Reports on African traditional healers are quite rare and focus essentially on their knowledge and treatment of psychiatric disorders or frequent endemic diseases, such as malaria, tuberculosis, or human immunodeficiency virus [25,26,27,28,29]. To date, and to our knowledge, there are no studies on traditional healers and noma disease.…”

Sociocultural contexts of mental illness experience among Africans

“…These observations and others in the literature would suggest that traditional methods of mental health care in Africa confer certain therapeutic benefits that are understood and appreciated by patients and their families but which may not always be objectively verifiable in standard experimental conditions (Ojagbemi & Gureje, 2020;Zingela et al, 2019). These observations emphasize the important gaps in conventional understanding of mental illnesses and their treatment in Africa.…”

“…Consequently, most users of their service perceive African traditional medicine treatment for mental health conditions as being effective. Adherence rates (Zingela et al, 2019) are thus substantially higher than the treatment retention rates for patients receiving biomedical mental healthcare (Wells et al, 2013).…”

Complementary health approaches use in Turkish patients with mental disorders: Related factors and perceived benefits

“…In the present study, 62% of the participants used CHA. The prevalence of the CHA use in patients with mental disorders was 44.8% in Germany, 19 6.4% in Singapore, 15 17.8% in Europe, 22 43.8% in the United States, 29 31% in South Africa, 30 62% in Sweden, 17 55% in Japan, 12 22–40% in Turkey, 13,20 82% in Saudi Arabia, 14 89% in Kenya, and 28% in Nigeria 18 . An evaluation of the results shows that the CHA use in mental disorders varies from one country to another, even from one region to another within the same country.…”