Page 52 - Creating Spiritual and Psychological Resilience

An Anthropologist Among Disaster Caregivers 21

When we enter people’s daily lives, spending time in local churches or
mental health clinics, talking with people in local communities, we stand
a much better chance of understanding not only how people experience
catastrophic disaster, but how they cope with more quotidian disasters.
Understanding this kind of coping would help both mental health pro-
fessionals and spiritual care providers support the strategies that are
already working.
Early in my fieldwork, I began to take notice of the different way that
arguments were framed, how people spoke about suffering, and what idi-
oms were used to describe distress. Cultures have highly specific and very
different ways of understanding the origins of distress, and the interven-
tions that are likely to diminish stress. Within any given culture, there is a
great degree of variability. But the variability is nested within cultural and
historical narratives that give them meaning (Harrington, 2008). Mental
health and spiritual care providers have their own cultures, which often
tacitly, without recognition of the impact of these cultures, determine the
options that might be used. Awareness of our own professional cultures
may point to some of the obstacles to collaboration.
How can anthropologists improve collaboration between various men-
tal health and religious care providers? Throughout my research among
disaster caregivers, I have kept a keen eye on the contextual nature of dis-
tress, the culturally and historically contingent nature of both religion and
mental health practice. I have tried to understand that how we describe
what someone might be experiencing is not just about that person, but
rather is embedded in a complex network of historical and cultural rela-
tionships. How does this perspective help a clinician struggling to pro-
vide care or a clergy person talking to a congregant? Understanding the
moral meaning of suffering (Kleinman & Benson, 2006), what’s at stake
for the help-seeker, the spiritual care provider and the mental health pro-
fessional, the overlaps and differences, helps to illuminate a common goal:
the reduction of suffering.
When confronted with someone whose cultural beliefs may differ from
our own, perhaps we will be less likely to make hasty conclusions. Imagine,
for instance, if someone from Indonesia told a Westerner that his or her
anxiety was in fact Latah, an Indonesian name for distress of a particular
kind. Likely, the reaction would be dismissive. But, in order to respond to
the needs of help-seekers, one can take into account the possibility that
those he or she is treating may have radically different views of their own
experience. Collaboration then takes place in the context of potentially
messy intertwining of interpretive viewpoints.