Psychiatric Study of Shamanism in Taiwan

Family Burdens, Chinese Health Beliefs, and the Mental Health of Chinese Caregivers in Hong Kong

“…The religious and cosmological perspective suggests that mental illness is a fate inflicted by supreme beings, and requires individuals and families to accept mental illness as inevitable. Taoist priests or folk healers often perform prayers and make offerings at temples or render shamanistic rites as healing rituals (Tseng, 1972). Although caregivers adhering to this perspective do not see themselves as being responsible for causing mental illness, they are deemed by fate to take on the responsibility of caring for their relatives.…”

Psychotherapy as the Manipulation of Endogenous Healing Mechanisms: A Transcultural Survey

“…Ion Southeast Asia and the West Pacific islands, the system can adopt a form which is at times indistinguishable from the dissociation phenomena described in the earlier section. In Korea, for instance, emotional illnesses are treated by a sixteen to twenty-four hour ritual in which the shaman takes on the voice and manner of a possessing spirit and delivers oracles to the patient during this state (Kim 1972, T9&dquo;~3 ) In Taiwan, where it is mainly children's illnesses that the shamans treat, the latter are possessed by spirits who conduct their own interviews with the children's parents, and the shaman remembers nothing of this on coming out of his trance (Tseng 1972). Similar patterns have been reported from Japan (Yoshida 1967;Sasaki 1969), Okinawa (Lebra 1969), Malaya (Kramer 1970), Nepal (Hitchcock 1973), and even to a limited extent from Siberia itself (Eliade 1951).…”