Acta Psychiatr Belg. 1983 Jan-Feb; 83(1): 43-9.

[The role of the healer in neuropsychiatric care in the Revolutionary People's Republic of Guinea]

Meyers C, Lorquet C, Diawara BM.

These comments reflect some actuality in Guinea, country where healers are generally controlled for their activities in order to integrate them to the medical life of the country, at least for primary care. In neuropsychiatry, the healer is more mysterious and less precise in its activities. He uses for its treatment exogenous factors: suggestion, a privileged relationship with his patient, drug administration. The endogenous factors used are dream utilisation, mystical states, transes. The neuropsychiatric healer integrates very poorly in the medical society and he will certainly create a problem in the future, with the coming of modern psychiatry. He will have to be situated in face of this socio cultural evaluation in the approach to mental patients. Nothing is done in this field, neither at the level of WHO, nor at the level of the state of Guinea.