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An Overview of Indigenous Descriptions of Mental Phenomena and the Range of Traditional Healing Practices Amongst the Vietnamese

Flinders University of South Australia, NSW, Australia

Derrick Silove

University of New South Wales, Australia

A wide range of expressions describing feelings and emotions is identifiable in the indigenous Vietnamese literature. The majority of Vietnamese expressions for common emotional states appear to have semantic equivalents in western psychology. The present overview draws on the lay and medical literature to provide examples of such expressions and descriptions. There does not appear to be evidence of a comprehensive psychiatric typology in the Vietnamese medical literature, although it is unclear to what extent the framework of Chinese medicine has influenced Vietnamese practitioners. Traditional Vietnamese health-care services, including those for mental-health problems, are eclectic, deriving their principles from cosmology, metaphysics and supernatural belief systems inter alia. The holistic notion of physical and mental health based on the state of harmony of the individual within the cosmos may be incompatible with the reductionistic principles underlying western taxonomies. Thus, the extent to which indigenous concepts of mental-ill-health influence Vietnamese immigrants’ choices about the utilization of either traditional or mainstream mental-health services in western countries needs further investigation.

Key Words: indigenous mental phenomena • indigenous services • mental health • traditional healing • Vietnamese

Transcultural Psychiatry, Vol. 36, No. 1, 79-94 (1999)
DOI: 10.1177/136346159903600105


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