Les représentations et croyances culturelles comme leviers thérapeutiques au Vietnam

Abstract

This work comes from a transcultural collaboration in the field of clinical psychology in Vietnam, and is written by a Vietnamese doctoral clinical psychologist working between France and Belgium, and a French clinical psychologist who worked 13 months in Ho Chi Minh. We will focus on exploring Vietnamese cultural representations of “madness”, the explanatory models of what can be called the psyche, the different readings and beliefs about mental illness. This will allow us to explore the interactions between traditional conceptions and the Western model, and thus, to generate understandings of the uniqueness of the mental care system in Vietnam. The example of a culture navigating between the contributions of so-called modern medicine and the attachment to beliefs deeply rooted in the history of this country, will allow us to show that the dynamic between traditional and Western practices is possible and useful for the therapeutical alliance, bound. It seems to be favored on the one hand, by opeing our mind to several grids of reading, and on the other hand, by shifting from our cultural reference to create a common language and benchmarks with our patient. This invites us to a salutary movement of decentration of the thinking, in clinical practice. For our work, we used a qualitative approach combining interviews with different professionals, observations, and scenarios drawn from our own experiences in Vietnam. Our results are thus qualitative and allowed us to identify alternative understandings, which opened to interpretations and generated a particular vigilance to the cultural interpretations of our work. This essay could also help professionals arriving in Vietnam to understand better the way clinical psychology works in this country, in a constant exercise to share and cross the perceptions and ideas.