When Mental Illness Gets Mistaken for Sorcery

When psychological pain gets read as sorcery behind the walls of Arab homes, a silent, painful journey unfolds — one that begins when a person’s state suddenly shifts: a mysterious sadness settles in, or a restless anxiety starts to stalk them, or voices and visions no one else can see begin to attack them. Here, in the absence of a clear scientific explanation, popular culture rushes to fill the gap with the fastest ready-made answers: the evil eye, envy, possession, or sorcery.

The Magical Interpretation of the World

This rush toward what Max Weber called “the magical interpretation of the world” stems from a deep gap in awareness, one that makes the mind link panic attacks and OCD to the nearest cultural inheritance it knows, as a way to avoid facing the idea that the mind itself might be sick. This collective flight toward the supernatural is reinforced by the fear of the stigma of mental illness; in many of our communities, admitting to a psychological disorder is still seen as synonymous with weak character or a lack of faith, while seeing a doctor is viewed as a stigma that follows the family forever. So interpreting the condition as “external sorcery” becomes a comfortable social solution, because it lifts responsibility off the individual and makes the crisis temporary and understandable — but in return, it turns a biological and psychological disorder that is entirely treatable into prolonged, chronic suffering, simply because specialized medical intervention is delayed.

A Chemical Imbalance, Not a Curse

The truth that science lays out, and that Andrew Solomon confirms in his dissection of depression, is that this pain is chemical imbalance in the brain and psychological trauma etched into memory — needing the doctor’s care just as much as spiritual support. The problem starts when medicine gets dismissed entirely in favor of supernatural explanations, and when someone suffering from OCD or hallucinations gets accused of having weak faith, while in reality they’re facing a disruption in their neurotransmitters no less real than a broken bone or a hormonal imbalance. We fear mental illness because it threatens our illusion of total control over our own minds; and as Michel Foucault pointed out, the world has always tended to isolate or rename “madness” rather than understand it.

Reclaiming Sovereignty Over the Mind

Today, reality tells us that more than half of those affected in our Arab region live their pain in deadly silence, out of fear of being misjudged. Psychological awareness today is a lifeline that protects the patient from losing their life amid the noise of ready-made “scripts”; a psychiatrist treats a vital organ in our body called the brain, and admitting this is the first step toward a person reclaiming sovereignty over their own life, far from the guillotine of ignorance and misleading explanations.

Picture the pattern as it actually unfolds in a living room rather than in the abstract: a young man starts waking at three in the morning with his heart pounding, certain something is choking him, and by the second week an aunt is convinced it’s an intrusion from a jinn rather than the textbook profile of a panic disorder. The family calls a raqi, a Quranic healer, before they call a doctor, not out of stupidity but because the raqi’s explanation comes with a ready-made ritual, a sense of agency, and no risk of the neighborhood finding out someone in the family sees a psychiatrist. Months can pass this way, sometimes years, while the underlying anxiety disorder, genuinely treatable with therapy and often medication, calcifies into something far harder to unwind, because the delay itself teaches the family that this is simply how the illness behaves.

It would be its own kind of arrogance to conclude from this that faith and psychiatry are simply enemies, because some of the more effective interventions in the region work by refusing that framing. Programs that train imams alongside mental health professionals, and therapeutic approaches built around religiously integrated cognitive behavioral therapy, have shown that patients often engage more consistently with treatment when a trusted religious figure is part of the referral rather than sidelined by it. The actual failure mode isn’t spiritual belief itself; most people manage to hold both a relationship with God and a prescription without contradiction. The failure mode is treating the spiritual explanation as a complete and sufficient one, when it’s being used to replace care rather than sit alongside it.

The fix, then, isn’t asking families to abandon a framework that gives them comfort and continuity, it’s building a wider one with room for both a raqi and a psychiatrist, without either party having to lose the argument. A family that brings a suffering relative to see a doctor hasn’t betrayed their faith. They’ve simply stopped asking one explanation to do a job it was never equipped to do alone, and given the organ actually involved, the brain, not the soul under siege, a fighting chance at the kind of care a broken bone would get without a second thought.