Psychiatric impressions during a stay in Dakar

Abstract

The author relates some impressions drawn from a two-week sojourn in Dakar, Senegal, on the occasion of the Second Pan-African Psychiatric Conference. One much discussed problem was whether there exists an 'African psychopathology'. The consensus was that the basic pathogenic factors are the same among mankind, but that culturally determined pathoplastic factors determine the symptomatology of reactive conditions and neuroses, as well as the themes of hallucinations and delusions. A more difficult problem was to explain the great frequency, in Senegal, of what French clinicians call the bouffées délirantes (a condition somewhat similar to acute paranoid schizophrenia). Socio-cultural hypotheses were proposed by professor H. Collomb and his associates. Professor Collomb and the psychiatric group in Dakar-Fann have made a special study of the African techniques of psychotherapy, and devised a kind of group therapy which combines African traditions with modern Western experiences. Some of the difficulties met by the European psychiatrists working in an African setting are recounted. The author also gives an account of his visit to the Dakar jails and reform institutions and of the type of criminality met in a developing country. The paper is concluded with a description of the Nit-ku-bon child; in certain families one of the children is considered a 'marvelous child', he is supposed to be possessed by a spirit or to be the reincarnation of an ancestor, and as such he enjoys special privileges, though the attitude of the family toward him is mostly ambivalent. The author had the opportunity of examining a Nit-ku-bon child, and feels that this child would fit into our category of 'early autism'.