Question: My sister died by suicide two years ago, as had my father 10 years earlier. My two sons abuse drugs and seem depressed, while my brother is in a bad state with depression. Is this a curse on our family?
Some years ago, we published a paper showing that modern-day mental health workers can collaborate with traditional healers if there is mutual respect between them.
In essence, what we demonstrated was that traditional healers had a role that was in some ways different and in other ways complementary to modern practice. At the centre of this complementary relationship was the recognition of the explanations for the cause of some mental disorders.
For the traditional healers, spiritual models of causation were intertwined with cultural beliefs and practices that, in some cases, as in yours, included curses that were due to past acts of omission or commission. In such cases, healing was said to require the appeasement of one or other displeased spirit.
The modes of appeasement varied a great deal, depending on the nature of the malady and ranged from simple acts of prayer and supplication to the spirits to complex acts of sacrifice of some animals, chanting of prayers and other seemingly bizarre acts of treatment.
One healer we worked with had a huge hospital with both in and outpatient facilities. The genius of his practice was that he could tell those diseases that he could cure from those that needed doctors. He could for example tell that those with some forms of severe epilepsy could only get better if they got medicine from the hospital, while those women who presented with some type of barrenness required “love and sometimes reconciliation” from their spouses or some close male relative.
When the two-way communication referral system was encouraged, he referred more appropriate patients to the hospital without the fear that his patient base would be depleted by such referrals. If anything, his name and fame spread.
It is easy to understand why you might conclude that your family is cursed. The number of people with mental disorders seems larger than one would expect by chance alone.
As a doctor, I would hold a different explanation for this phenomenon. I would suggest that the depressive illness that seems so prevalent in the family is possibly in your genes and that the explanation for the frequency is to be found in biology rather than in a curse. Of course, other explanations are possible.
From parents, we inherit all the good and bad that they in turn inherited from their parents and so on.
In your case, it is possible to speculate that it was your father and that your sisters and brother inherited the gene for the condition. Although depression seems not to have affected you, your two sons who abuse drugs might be doing so in the context of a depressive illness inherited from their grandfather through you.
Genetics is in some ways a complex subject because one must explain why, for example, the condition seems to have skipped you yet you are capable of still carrying the gene to the next generation.
