ナタンを読み解く治療者たち

イタリアにおける民族精神医学の政治的含意と臨床

抄録

Since the early ’90s, Italy has accommodated migrants from all over the world who often regard Italy as a transit country rather than a place where they will settle permanently. Italian clinicians recognize that providing appropriate mental health services to these migrants is difficult because of the great diversity of their origin countries and motives for migration. Additionally, there is little possibility of their becoming Italian citizens. The methods for treating mental illness among non-Western patients often differs from modern Western methods, but it is nearly impossible to fully understand migrants’ cultural differences because of the wide variety of cultures among patients at the clinic. Moreover, working toward a patient’s social inclusion as a means of treatment may be inefficient when they are not willing to become an Italian citizen. To tackle these problems, clinicians refer to French ethnopsychiatry proposed by Tobie Nathan, wherein any discourse, including the patient’s traditional etiologic theory, is accommodated and used in a complementary way. The aim of this study is to show how therapists use ethnopsychiatry in Italy by examining mainly their statements on the use of patient’s discourse, such as witchcraft discourse. The findings suggest that ethnopsychiatry can help identify how migrants confront their own mental illnesses and can transcend the limits of modern Western mental health practices. Therefore, it may be argued that the use of ethnopsychiatry can emancipate therapists from the scheme of conventional mental health practices and assist them in developing an adequate treatment method for each migrant.