Abstract
About 35–45% of refugees and asylum seekers in Denmark suffer from PTSD, anxiety and/or depression, and a growing number of Muslim refugees encounter Danish psychiatry, e.g., at the outpatient mental health facility Competence Centre for Transcultural Psychiatry (CTP) in Copenhagen (Turrini et al. in Journal of Mental Health Systems 11:51, 2017). The intercultural encounter between refugees from Muslim countries and Western psychiatry reveals differences in the conceptualization of mental illness. Jinn beliefs (beliefs in spirits in Islam) can play a substantial role in some Muslim patients’ conceptualization of distress, while Western mental health professionals rarely incorporate religious beliefs in their understanding of mental illness. The mismatch in explanatory models is grounded in divergent ontological worldviews and can lead to misdiagnosis and delayed treatment. This article stresses the need for incorporating both cultural and psychiatric perspectives to understand distress attributed to jinn influence by Muslim patients. First, the article introduces the Islamic notion of jinn. Then, it addresses the subject of possession from a psychiatric and anthropological perspective. Additionally, an example of a phenomenon often attributed to jinn will also be presented from a psychiatric and cultural perspective. Second, the article presents three cases in which patients from the CTP use jinn beliefs as an explanatory model for (part of) their afflictions.
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Galsgaard, M. (2021). Jinn Beliefs in Western Psychiatry: A Study of Three Cases from a Psychiatric and Cultural Perspective. In: Böttcher, A., Krawietz, B. (eds) Islam, Migration and Jinn. The Modern Muslim World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61247-4_10
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