The outbreak of the first psychotic episode disarrays the person's everyday experience and of significant others. This work takes the notion of experience as the key mediating variable to understand how the cultural and social frame affects the experience of psychosis. Culture contributes to the articulation of the experience of psychosis through its influence on individual, family, and community reactions. I focused on the first psychotic experience of low-income youth living in Sao Paulo, Brazil because one can see more clearly the role played by the cultural and social dimensions, since the process of experiencing psychosis is not yet totally settled. / I emphasized the basic strategies created by psychotic patients and their families to reorganize their experience of themselves and of the world, and the dynamics and underpinning of these strategies in relation to cultural signifiers. I particularly explored how psychotic patients and their families appropriate, borrow and transform cultural signifiers, and more specifically religious signifiers, in their attempt to cope with psychosis. Religious signifiers are pervasive and diverse in Brazilian culture; furthermore different people may or may not resort to or be affected by religious idioms and signifiers in a similar way. A wide range of variation in the use of religious idioms and signifiers can be expected among patients, at different moments of their life history, and when the experiences of patients and significant others are compared. Religion can have a positive impact over the experience of psychosis, a negative, or even a neutral impact depending on the person and circumstances. / My work also demonstrates that psychotic patients are subjected to a double-process of marginality due to their poor living conditions and to urban violence; and to the fact that their marginality is further accentuated by the psychotic episode. People's reactions also vary and change in relation to the kinds of behaviours manifested by psychotic patients, in addition to the social role of each family member and the family dynamics at play. More generally, people's reactions work in a kind of "feed-back loop," since family reactions modify the subjective world and reactions of patients, while patients' reactions modify family attitudes and behaviours.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.37817 |
| Date | January 2000 |
| Creators | Redko, Cristina Pozzi. |
| Contributors | Corin, Ellen (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Anthropology.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001805881, proquestno: NQ70133, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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