Title : How traditional healing is understood to work with psychotic symptoms and how they can work in collaboration with different health systems: A meta-ethnography
Abstract:
Traditional healers appeal to spiritual, magical or religious explanations for disease and distress. Spiritual healing has benefits over conventional scientific treatment due to its reduced stigma in recognised populations and inclusion of the community in the healing process. With the incidence of schizophrenia and psychosis increasing, this meta-ethnography aims to explore how traditional healers work with psychotic symptoms and how they can collaborate with the healthcare system. With traditional healers being the first point of contact for mental illness in many local populations, especially in rural areas, and a distrust of western psychiatric treatment in these communities, the integration of traditional healing into the healthcare system may serve as a pathway to bridge the treatment gap. Currently, there is no review that focuses on traditional healing and psychosis specifically or generates theories for their collaboration with different health systems. This review will focus on qualitative outcomes to non-ethnopharmacological treatments like psychospiritual treatments. I will search four databases (Pubmed, PSYCInfo, CINAHL, Embase) and the reference lists of included papers. The included studies will be assessed by the CASP checklist, with the highest scoring study being used as the index study. The themes from each paper will be categorised and juxtaposed to construct third-order constructs and a line of argument synthesis. eMERGE and PRISMA will be used to ensure good reporting quality.
