16 - Answers to Anxiety

Summary

A YOUNG HUSBAND FINDS HIMSELF IMPOTENT NOT LONG AFTER marriage. Applying to a traditional doctor, he is informed that his sister is a witch who has removed his testicles. Unless these are returned to him, his impotence will continue. The sister is accordingly summoned before the doctor. She readily confesses her guilt and informs those at the hearing that she has hidden her brother's testicles in an ant hill. When asked whether the ants will not have eaten the testicles, she replies that she hid them in an empty cigarette tin. With this information the doctor and his followers move to the ant hill in question, and begin to dig. They turn up an empty cigarette tin. This tin is presented to the patient by the doctor, and the patient gratefully accepts with it the return of his missing testicles. Within a year, his wife is delivered of a son.

Most psychiatric workers in Africa seem now agreed that suggestive therapy in cases of this kind, practised by traditional doctors deeply familiar with their milieu, has often obtained good results. The following exchange lately took place during a radio interview with Dr T. Adeoye Lambo, M.D., M.R.C.P., D.P.M., a Nigerian psychiatrist much respected for his clinical work, who has since become Vice- Chancellor of Ibadan University:

Is it possible to say how effective these witch-doctors, these traditional healers, are in treatment?

Lambo: Let me be perfectly honest with you. Their treatment procedures and their entire management are, I think, vastly superior to what we are doing at the present moment in Nigeria.

To what you are doing?

Latnbo: To what I am doing: and probably to what some of my colleagues are doing.

Let us get down to figures, Dr Lambo: what is their success rate in your estimation?

Lambo: About three years ago we made an evaluation, a programme of their work, and compared this with our own, and we discovered that actually they were scoring almost sixty per cent success in their treatment of neurosis. And we were scoring forty per cent— in fact, less than forty per cent.

This is not to argue that traditional methods of psychotherapy have been sufficient. Though useful in the treatment of anxiety neuroses they were and are not, according to another specialist opinion, of any help to psychotics or to people suffering from severe traumatic reactions.