The Brain Is Not Working (Thluak Rian a Ttuan Lo): Perceptions of Mental Illness in a Resettled Chin Community

Abstract

For decades, violent conflict has caused forced displacement throughout Myanmar. Chin people, largely from the northwestern Chin state in Myanmar, have been subjected to this violence resulting in displacement and resettlement with refugee status for thousands of Chin people. Scholars have often endeavored to understand the psychological outcomes of displacement and resettlement, with empirical work often dedicated to the onset of posttraumatic stress, depression, anxiety, and other Western-defined constructs of mental illness being correlated with traumatic experiences. These endeavors fail to center cultural explanations of mental illness among specific cultural groups like the Chin. Therefore, we used a community-collaborative, grounded theory approach to interview Chin people (N = 20) resettled in the midwestern United States. Grounded theory analyses led to identification of two categories reflecting participants’ explanatory models of mental illness: (a) The Brain is Not working and (b) Causal Beliefs of The Brain not Working. The first category has one subcategory (Symptoms of the Brain not Working) and the second category is separated into three subcategories: (a) Going Crazy, Being Born Like that, and Thinking too Much as Causes, (b) Religion as an Explanation, and (c) “Control Your Heart”: Personal Responsibility and the Onset of Illness. These are discussed in light of the need to better understand cultural models of illness for Chin people with refugee status in contexts of resettlement. Specific attention is afforded to potential importance of this idiom of distress.