Cultural concepts of the person and mental health in Africa
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
People in different cultures have different concepts of the person that underlie self-understanding and self-representation. These concepts influence many aspects of individuals' life experience, including illness and expectations toward recovery. Psychotherapies aim to promote adaptive change in experience and behavior. This goal is embedded in a social and cultural context that promotes or sanctions a particular notion of personhood. If every system of psychotherapy depends on implicit models of personhood, which varies cross-culturally, then the goals and methods of therapeutic change must consider the cultural concept of the person. This paper reviews cultural concepts of the person in relation to communal values, practices, and systems of thought observed across many African cultural contexts. It presents a practical framework that can inform therapists working with African clients. Many African cultures promote a relational-oriented personhood, in which an individual manifests his or her personhood through connections to three distinct forms of agency: (a) spiritual agency, including God, ancestors, and spirits that influence the person; (b) social agency, including the family, the clan, and the community, with extension to humanity; and (c) self-agency, which is responsible for the person's inner experience. This distinctive form of personhood underlies concepts of the "normal" person, understandings of mental illness, help-seeking behavior, and clients' needs and expectations. Implications of this cultural concept of the person for psychotherapy with African clients are discussed.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it