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This study explores how psychological distress is identified and explained among Zulu people, examines how traditional healers understand their role and treatment methods and investigates the interaction between traditional and Western approaches to health care. Zulu people consult traditional healers namely diviners, faith healers or herbalists, as well as Western doctors to treat mental illness and distress. Whilst Western biomedicine is seen as useful in providing treatment, diviners and faith healers are particularly valued for their skills in identifying the cause of illness. Patients and their families tend to shop around for a practitioner who gives advice in keeping with their own beliefs. Psychological distress is usually explained in terms of sorcery, displeasure from the ancestors or social causes. Traditional healers use treatments aimed at harmonizing the patient with their environment through neutralizing sorcery, appeasing ancestors or directly manipulating the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jonathan Martin was a fundamentalist itinerant Christian preacher. Outraged by the laxity of Church of England clergy and inspired by prophetic dreams, he set fire to York Minster in 1829. At his trial for this capital offence, medical expert witnesses argued that Jonathan Martin was suffering from monomania and he was incarcerated for the rest of his life in Bethlem Hospital. This paper reviews the medico-legal use of the insanity defence in cases of religious motives for grave offences from the early 19th Century, and describes the millenarian climate of the period as well as the phenomenon of biblical exegesis and prophecy. Finally, the case of a contemporary bible-inspired arsonist is reviewed and his medical mitigation and 'disposal' is compared with that of Jonathan Martin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The renewed research on religious experience and psychiatric illness requires a short and accessible measure of religious background, experience, belief and practice among patients and their families. The fourth edition of an unpublished questionnaire, previously used in clinical practice and research, is presented along with its scoring notes and its limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Psychopathology’ without a discrete biological aetiology deploys available cultural models and may on occasion be epidemic. British media reports of a relatively new social phenomenon, hostage-taking followed by sieges, were examined. The protagonists were generally young men, and the majority of the sieges occurred in an urban setting. Sieges with a domestic motivation were more likely than those occurring in the course of a crime to result in death or other violence to the principal and hostage. In contrast both with other western ‘culture-specific’ patterns and with criminal sieges, domestic sieges may thus be understood as primarily expressive rather than instrumental. Yet, subjective agency engages with shared idioms of retribution, sacrifice and redemption in what may not inappropriately be considered as ritual performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]