By Patrick Tracey

I stumbled on the hyena treatment after seeing the new Tom Hanks vehicle Captain Phillips. I happen to have a personal connection to the film, being friends with Jim Phillips, the older brother of Captain Phillips, so I was clicking around the net looking for more info on what drives Somalis to such desperation.

Traditionally, families in the Horn of Africa cared for the mentally ill under the guidance of  religious leaders and cultural healers, an arrangement that has broken down in the civil war that devastated the coastal country.  But so many were raped and tortured and starved that trauma-inflamed mental illness has come to define the  Somali community.

An unusual number of Somali immigrants to the United State have presented with psychotic disturbances too.

Famine Studies Do Not Bode Well

The problem is set to get worse as war and drought combine to produce famine that drives rates higher for the starving Somalis. Famine studies elsewhere have shown that children who endure severe malnutrition at a young age or while in the womb might be at a higher risk for certain diseases

Scientists from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing have confirmed WWII Dutch Winter Hunger studies that show that famine nearly doubles rates of schizophrenia.  That’s what happened following the Great Chinese Famine that lasted from 1958 to 1961.

Researchers spotted the same risks studying 1944’s “Hunger Winter,” a 6-month famine around Rotterdam and other easter cities of the Netherlands during World War II. Interestingly, the risks to those carried through a famine in utero during the famine were highest.

Famine also explains the historically high rates of madness once found in Ireland.

Can the Somalis eliminate such brutishness? Yes, as Dr. Hab hows.

But they could inhibit the spread of schizophrenia from the world’s highest rates just by reducing famine.

Source: Psych central

 

1 COMMENT

  1. The site administrator has lost his mind, what's with the Congo man with Hyena got to do with the mentally ill people in Somalia?

  2. ..Just by reducing warlordism warmongering, then famine and other killer diseases could
    be averted. That ofcourse requires democratic strong Sovereign State. The failed Somalia
    ruled by self inflicted toothless FGS administered by foreign key players carries with it all the
    ill ailments and defects of beyond local repairs. Such is the true overall picture of Somalia
    in peril.
    Cheers.

  3. I wonder where is the link between the title and the article here. Generally speaking, the hyena practices is very rare in all lands inhabited by all somali ethnics and to claim that such a bad thing exist all over the place is just unfair and it shows the level the projudice stance that sl press take against all somalis, and i wonder if this is not an ethiopress at the end of it.
    In addition, there is no link between somalia and ireland here, if iresh people get mad because they couldn't eat, somalis had this so called mental problems with food all over the place. That's because in east africa, they use allot of black magic, and that's true for all countries ethiopia, kenya, somalia and so on. Oman, on the other side of the sea imported those bad habits and they also got the same problem when their country is thriving.
    For us, this is not a mental problem, this is one of Allah's creation who is harming another entity, and reading some specific verses of the almighty words over and over can do the job.