Magico-Religious beliefs among primary care takers of manic patients

Abstract

Introduction: Mania is one of the commonest psychiatric disorders that require immediate interventions. There is a wide held belief that co-occurrence of mental disorders and underlying religious or spiritual problems is found. Local and community belief in such phenomena appeared to be a factor in influencing the decision to seek Magico-Religious treatment. The study was done with the objective to determine the attitudes of the primary care taker with respect to Magico-Religious beliefs which can have impact on treatment seeking behavior and timely consultation to the psychiatrist for underlying condition.

Materials and Method: Consecutive fifty primary care takers who accompanied the patient and gave consent were included in the study. The supernatural Attitude questionnaire developed to study the magico religious beliefs was applied to the primary care taker. Both parametric and non parametric statistical tools were applied to analyze the variables.

Results: About 48% believed that performing magico-religious rituals could improve the behavior of the patients and 76% of the primary caretakers visited faith healer for this purpose. Association between Magico-religious treatment group and non-magico-religious treatment group with different variables like Age, Sex, Religion, Socio-Economic Status, Education and Occupation, were compared, which shows that, all the variables were comparable and the P-value was not significant.

Conclusion: There is a common belief among the primary care takers about the relationship between supernatural’s influences and mental illness. The study concluded that there exists no significant relationship between socio demographic characteristics of a primary care takers and traditional practices and beliefs and hence are independent of each other.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/jpan.v2i1.8568

J Psychiatrists’ Association of Nepal Vol .2, No.1, 2013 7-13