Paper short abstract:

The paper uses the De Certau concepts of “strategy” and “tactics” to analyse how suffering people deal with the categories of mental problems and with those of spiritual troubles. From the point of view of the suffering they are tools in a tactical struggle to find their place in a social arena

Paper long abstract:

The paper is based on two different fieldworks carried on by the authors in Ethiopia and among the Ethiopian and Eritrean refugees belonging to Pentecostal churches in Rome. It aims to use the De Certau concepts of "strategy" and "tactics" to analyse how suffering people deal with the categories of mental problems, as they are conceived by biomedicine, and with those of spiritual troubles, as they are intended within the ORTHODOX CHURCH AND THE Pentecostal ones.

Both in Ethiopia and abroad, the experience of suffering could be labelled through the psychiatric categories or within a religious discourse.

The aim of the authors is not to counterpose the psychiatric discourse to religious ones. Rather they see both as speeches "strategically" built by those who have the power to designate the suffering as a problem, whether medical or religious.

The discourses and (self)-interpretations activate by the suffering people will be analysed as "tactical" behaviours in order to get what they consider is better to improve their situation.

If we focus on the experience of suffering people, then both the global health perspective and the religious ones can be seen in a different ways. If they are two different and competing discourses, from the point of view of the suffering people they are also tools in a tactical struggle to find their room and their place in a global social arena. It can shed a different light in the way of regarding global mental health from an anthropological point of view.