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Madness and Disabilities: Interview with Geoffrey Reaume
support. Of course, today, the evil omen is thankfully banished in
religions in most of the world of which I am aware but the charity
model remains though I also know that many people with disabili-
ties who are religious would express agency in how they interpret
their lives in relation to religion. The important thing is to incorpo-
rate religious humanitarianism, which has a long history towards
disability in various religions, with modern notions of the rights and
abilities of people with disabilities to be treated as equals, rather
than as objects of pity in the world.
Heilpädagogik online: When you think about concepts of psychi-
atric disabilities during the last decades - do they differ in different
cultures?
Geoffrey Reaume: Yes, of course, there are huge differences
across cultures. Transcultural psychiatry is an important area of
study, as has been evident in the work of Suman Fernando, for ex-
ample, in which different experiences of mental health/madness
are expressed and understood in different cultures and parts of the
world, past and present. Much of the racism in psychiatry, histori-
cally, is due to an assumption of a western, white European or
North American bio-medical model of madness. This has led to in-
credibly harmful and oppressive practices towards people who be-
longed to different cultural traditions, such as aboriginal people in
North America whose religious and cultural practices were outlawed
in many instances and even pathologized leading to incarceration
and brutalization. Similarly notions of hearing voices has historically
been labelled as schizophrenia when in fact people from southern
African indigenous cultures value people who hear voices in their
community. At the same time, the prejudice within various cultures
the world over continues to affect people with psychiatric disabili-
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Heilpädagogik online 04/ 08