Biomedical subjects

C C Brant

Publications and source records attributed to C C Brant.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1990

Native ethics and rules of behaviour.

Psychiatrists assessing Native children and adolescents often find them passive, difficult to assess and not forthcoming. This behaviour, which actually reflects the influence of Native culture, is often misinterpreted by clinicians unfamiliar with that culture as evidence of psychopathology. Patterns of conflict suppression, conflict projection and the humiliating superego are described and placed in their historical and cultural perspective, where they originated as techniques of ensuring the group unity and cohesion essential for survival in a hostile environment. Failure to recognize and understand such cultural influences can lead to errors in diagnosis and treatment that can turn what was intended as a helpful encounter into a destructive one.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1988

Symptom patterns of alcoholism in a northern Ontario population.

Alcoholism is noted to be a common problem in Canada and particularly in native populations. We report here a survey of the frequency of evidence of alcoholism over a period of four months in a relatively isolated Northern Ontario population in which more than 80% were either status Indians or of partly Indian origin. Using questionnaire methods, "definite" alcoholism was found to affect 27% of adults seen at a clinic and probable alcoholism affected another 20%. This gives a minimum prevalence of 14.6% of the local adult population over a four month period on the basis merely of examination of less than one third of the adults in the community. Blackouts, tremors, bad temper, chest pain, unsteadiness, loss of appetite, vomiting, sadness and stomach pain occurred significantly more often in the alcoholic patients. Stomach pain, loss of appetite and vomiting were less prominent with alcoholism in this population than in a Southern population. The findings indicate the importance in general practice of looking for alcoholism, the ease with which this may be undertaken with a few very simple short questions and the importance of some characteristic patterns, especially blackouts, shakiness and unsteadiness as one pattern and stomach pain and other gastro-intestinal symptoms as another pattern.

Adult↗

PubMed1981

A note on the occurrence of pain in psychiatric patients from a Canadian indian and Inuit population.

Fifty patients are reported from a psychiatric service to a Native population. Thirty-two (64%) had pain of whom 19 had physical lesions. The number with pain is thought to be somewhat higher than might have been predicted from a priori considerations. Depression was the commonest psychiatric diagnosis both with and without pain. The head was the commonest site for pain whilst no patient had pain in the back as a primary complaint and only two had back pain as a secondary complaint.

Adult↗