That should not be your conclusion from the article.
"the voices" are hardly the only symptom that people with schizophrenia suffer from. A lot of those affected don't have auditory hallucinations at all and are still suffering from one of the (if not the) most debilitating mental disorders out there.
Calling it "friendly" risks trivialising of the very real symptoms.
> In Accra, Ghana, where the culture accepts that disembodied spirits can talk, few subjects described voices in brain disease terms. When people talked about their voices, 10 of them called the experience predominantly positive; 16 of them reported hearing God audibly. “‘Mostly, the voices are good,’” one participant remarked.
This seems clinically useful. The existence of other symptoms doesn't really change that fact.
I am merely commenting on your takeaway that this somehow means that some cultures see schizophrenia as "friendly", which does absolutely does not follow from the fact that the "mostly, the voices are good".
I would also think that this is likely due to cultural differences and in many cases probably adds to the problem.
https://doi.org/10.3109/09540261.2012.711746
From the full Article:
"People suffering from psychotic illness continue to hold multi-explanatory models. The cultural, religious and social explanatory models are predominant in non-western cultures."
"Limited evidence suggests that traditional belief models affect [duration of untreated psychosis], and explanatory models based on spiritual and social causes of illness may result in delayed presentations for professional help."
I also have a hard time believing that schizophrenia manifests as something like benign quirkiness in some other country.
Well, publish that null result in a journal!
> This idea relocates the problem from the individual to “culture” or “society”...
No, one could incorporate this information just fine on an individual level by treating it as less of a scary symptom and more of something to understand.
I'm generally skeptical of too-good-to-be-true factoids. My skepticism is not publication-worthy, it's pretty common, and taken too far it becomes cynicism. Every once in while my skepticism is misplaced.
I am curious though - do you have individual examples, or personal experience, of how some other culture handles schizophrenia in an understanding way? I saw the journal reference...i'm more interested in specific examples.
But if a respected peer-reviewed journal published a study demonstrating evidence of it, you'd want to at least take a peek.
> I am curious though - do you have individual examples, or personal experience, of how some other culture handles schizophrenia in an understanding way? I saw the journal reference...i'm more interested in specific examples.
These are in the article and the study itself.
"Among the Indians in Chennai, more than half (11) heard voices of kin or family members commanding them to do tasks. “They talk as if elder people advising younger people,” one subject said. That contrasts to the Americans, only two of whom heard family members. Also, the Indians heard fewer threatening voices than the Americans – several heard the voices as playful, as manifesting spirits or magic, and even as entertaining. Finally, not as many of them described the voices in terms of a medical or psychiatric problem, as all of the Americans did."
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2014/07/voices-culture-luh...
> In the United States, the voices are harsher, and in Africa and India, more benign, said Tanya Luhrmann, a Stanford professor of anthropology and first author of the article in the British Journal of Psychiatry.