“Now he walks and walks, as if he didn’t have a home where he could eat”: Food, Healing, and Hunger in Quechua Narratives of Madness

Abstract

"Now he walks and walks, as if he didn't have a home where he could eat": food, healing, and hunger in Quechua narratives of madness Article (Accepted Version) http://sro.sussex.ac.uk Orr, David (2013) Copyright and reuse:Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University.Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available.Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. This is the post-print version of the article. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1007/s11013-013-9336-9 1 'Now he walks and walks, as if he didn't have a home where he could eat': Food, Healing and Hunger in Quechua Narratives of Madness David M.R. Orr AbstractIn the Quechua-speaking peasant communities of southern Peru, mental disorder is understood less as individualized pathology and more as disturbance in family and social relationships. For many Andeans, food and feeding are ontologically fundamental to such relationships. This paper uses data from interviews and participant observation in a rural province of Cuzco to explore the significance of food and hunger in local discussion of madness. Carers' narratives, explanatory models, and theories of healing all draw heavily on idioms of food sharing and consumption in making sense of affliction, and these concepts structure understandings of madness that differ significantly from those assumed by formal mental health services. Greater awareness of the salience of these themes could strengthen the input of psychiatric and psychological care with this population, and enhance knowledge of the alternative treatments they use. Moreover, this case provides lessons for the global mental health movement on the importance of openness to the ways in which indigenous cultures may construct health, madness and sociality. Such local meanings should be considered by mental health workers delivering services in order to provide care that can adjust to the alternative ontologies of sufferers and carers.

Concepts of madness in diverse settings: a qualitative study from the INTREPID project

“…Subsequent research outside of Western settings, e.g., in Laos [13], Ethiopia [3, 14], Peru [15], Indonesia [16], China [17] and Uganda [18] generally confirm these findings. A systematic review of explanatory models of psychosis presents a more nuanced perspective [19].…”

Barriers to care and psychopathology among Bolivian migrants living in São Paulo, Brazil

“…Almost all of the Bolivian migrants living in Sa˜o Paulo, Brazil, have a Quechua background. For this group, mental suffering and the presence of mental disorders are less understood as individualized pathology and more as a disturbance in family and social relationships (Orr 2013). So, we can hypothesize that understand mental illness as socially-based could on one side reduce the stigma and on the other side, make it more difficult to identify an individual in need of professional help for a mental health issue.…”

Towards an indigenous definition of health: an explorative study to understand the indigenous Ecuadorian people’s health and illness concepts

“…The importance of food in the health-illness process is another issue that arose in this study. In Orr's [25] publication about "Food, Healing, and Hunger in Quechua Narratives of Madness," three overlapping categories emerged: food as symptoms, as an explanatory model, and as a facet of healing. In our study, we observed that nutrition is also referred to in these three ways; participants thought that poor nutrition creates illness, that a sick person cannot "eat with pleasure" and that food is also used as an important part of the healing process.…”