Medical anthropologists have argued that therapeutic efficacy goes beyond addressing clinical aspects of illness and disease. This is particularly true for chronic or persistent illnesses where religion has been shown to play a central role in how people conceptualize and manage their health concerns. A unifying theme within this literature is that illness suffering involves more than specific symptoms, but also existential crisis, loss of control over fate, social stigma, erosion of social support, and socio-economic hardship. A comprehensive understanding of treatment efficacy, and religion’s many possible roles in it, however, remains elusive. Of particular recent interest is the role religion may play in the lives of people with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia constitutes one of the most severe psychiatric illnesses, and epitomizes many non-symptomatic sources of suffering. Recent studies show that patients with schizophrenia are especially likely to turn to religion after the onset of their illness. Studies also show that in less industrialized countries, where religious healing is often a more prevalent and highly utilized form of treatment for schizophrenia, patients appear to have a better outcome. However, no complete ethnographic studies have fully elucidated the roles played by specific religions in the lives of people with schizophrenia, particularly in terms of how religious understandings of suffering influence the subjective experience of the illness, as well as the actions and perceptions of family members, healers, and the community at large. In order to address this gap in our understanding of severe mental illness, an ethnographic study was conducted on the influence Burmese Buddhism understandings of suffering had on the subjective experience and social perceptions of schizophrenia. More than any other religion, Buddhism promotes the inevitability and transcendence of suffering as a central theme. It was hypothesized that Buddhism would play a central and uniquely beneficial role in the lives of the severely mentally ill. However, this expectation was not entirely met. This thesis delves into the roles of Buddhism in the lives of people with schizophrenia: its positive role in addressing patients’ illness symptoms and suffering, as well as its negative role in shaping prejudicial perceptions of the mentally ill.
