Conceptualization of the Symptoms of Schizophrenia in Ethnopsychiatry

Abstract

The starting point of the article is the investigation of paradigmatic evolution of the conceptualization of schizophrenia symptoms in transcultural psychiatry on the basis of comparative analysis. Within the research the following methods were applied: cultural and logical studies, the methods of comparative analysis and hermeneutic reconstruction. As a research outcome, we explicated cultural, ethnic, and historical conditioning of the concept «schizophrenia». Besides, we represented a philosophical «hermeneutic model» of the origin of the disease called schizophrenia, which is heuristic for the conceptual formation of a new image of pathology. The abovementioned prerequisites provide for enriching the concept of «schizophrenia» by understanding hallucinogenic activity and various types of mystical unconscious knowledge in addition to ethnic, philosophical, anthropological, and sociocultural issues. The research novelty of the article is in the dialectical reconstruction of different cultural and ethnic approaches to the analysis of schizophrenia, which allowed us to find a multifaceted solution of the problem of its ‘presuppositiveness’.