Saints and "Possession": A Case Review Bordering Ethnopsychiatry and Cultural Diversity.

ABSTRACT

The migrations of modern times have exposed psychiatrists and other medical experts to elements from other cultures which have to be recognised and discerned from pathology. In the present paper, we offer an overview of both historical and modern witnessings of various kinds of "possession", with shedding light on the whole process of diagnostics-taking into account all aspects that make a person as an individual with particular emphasis on origin, lifestyle, moral values, and ethical norms what is sometimes easily associable with culture-bound phenomena, and sometimes overstepping the border of clinical disturbance, to maximise the possibility of recovery.