Abstract for presentation at International Association for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied Professions Congress

Parental magico-religious illness beliefs in an adolescent girl with Major Depression and systemic Lupus Erythematosus

  • Olivier Bricou, France
  • Olivier Taïeb, (1) Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (Pr. M. R. Moro), Avicenne Hospital (AP-HP), Paris 13 University, Bobigny, Fr, France
  • Benoit Ditray, R. Moro), Avicenne Hospital (AP-HP), Paris 13 University, Bobigny, Fr, France
  • Anne Reavah Levy, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (Pr. M. R. Moro), Avicenne Hospital (AP-HP), Paris 13 University, Bobigny, Fr, France
  • Félicai Heidenreich, (1) Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (Pr. M. R. Moro), Avicenne Hospital (AP-HP), Paris 13 University, Bobigny, Fr, France
  • Loïc Guillevin, (1) Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (Pr. M. R. Moro), Avicenne Hospital (AP-HP), Paris 13 University, Bobigny, Fr, France
  • Catherine Ledu, (1) Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (Pr. M. R. Moro), Avicenne Hospital (AP-HP), Paris 13 University, Bobigny, Fr, France
  • Marie Rose Moro, (1) Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (Pr. M. R. Moro), Avicenne Hospital (AP-HP), Paris 13 University, Bobigny, Fr, France

    • Purpose: To describe how the understanding of parents’ illness beliefs has been a therapeutical support in the psychiatric of an adolescent girl immigrants’ children with major depression, which occur in the course of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE).
    Methods: a case report of a 15-year old girl born in France affected by SLE for two years, referred to the consultation liaison psychiatry with symptoms of major depression according to DSM-IV. There were neither obvious SLE activity nor neurological symptoms during this follow up. We particularly study the cultural explanations of her parents who came from Algeria which coexisted with biomedical meanings.
    Results: The outpatient psychiatric follow-up lasted for a year and a half and included individual psychotherapy and psychiatric consultation with her parents with a favorable outcome. This young girl and her parents had been invited to a wedding in Algeria, when she was 14, a good age to get married there. For the parents someone could have thrown the evil eye on them in order to neutralize her as a rival and to protect the bride, in spite of the fact that the patient disagreed with her parents’ representations.
    Conclusions: Many aspects of psychiatry, as diagnosis, illness behavior, help-seeking, and perceived quality of care, are affected by illness beliefs (Kleinman, 1980). This case illustrates, in consultation-liaison psychiatry, how it is essential to understand patients’ own illness experience, especially in immigrants or in immigrants’ children. The transcultural setting with an anthropological training, has allowed the formulating of these illness beliefs. This has helped to minimize the gap between Western health care and illness experience, and also between the parents’ and their adolescent’s cultural worlds by constructing a common sense to what happened. Even though these beliefs were not congruent to the disease biomedical explanations, the patient’s compliance to the medical and psychiatric treatment was excellent.

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