title: Historiographic analysis of the Jamaican 'Shakatani' scotoma from the short stories of Erna Brodber.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To use historiography in the analysis of the fictional writings of a Jamaican novelist to identify aspects of psychopathology of Jamaican people.
  
  
  METHODS
  Each of 12 stories of "The World is a High Hill" by novelist Erna Brodber was assigned an explanatory title and a 'psychic centrality'. A narrative qualitative analysis of the fourteen main themes of each story was created using a Lickert scale, calculating the psychopathological penetrance or weighted significance of each theme.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The four main psychic centrality containments that emerged from this analysis were the black/white racial paradox (n = 4, 33%) and the partisan/political paradox (n = 1, 8%), the sexual/duplicity paradox (n = 5, 43%) and the social/spiritual paradox (n = 2, 17%). Five of fourteen themes reached maximal penetrance: family (92%), representation of generations with families (92%), issues of intimacy (92%), sex (75%) and issues of dependency (67%). Seven themes - personal and social conflicts (64%), issues of child development (53%), sexual identity (50%), pregnancy (48%), and political (42%), racial (36%), and religious (33%) conflicts reached moderate penetrance. The two themes of migration (30%) and homosexuality (14%) reached minimal penetrance.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The analysis reveals a profound and practical historiographic representation of the contemporary scotoma that currently paralyses many Jamaicans as a product of the enslavement of Africans in the New World, and mirrors the clinical syndrome of personality disorder revealed from contemporary Jamaican medical research.
authors.affiliation: Caribbean Institute of Mental Health, and Substance Abuse (CARIMENSA), The University of the West Indies, Kingston 7, Jamaica, West Indies. frederick.hickling@uwimona.edu.jm; fred@fredhickling.com.
authors.forename: F W
authors.initials: FW
authors.lastname: Hickling
mesh_terms: D005260:Female; D006663:Historiography; D006801:Humans; D007563:Jamaica / Q000453:epidemiology; D008297:Male; D010554:Personality Disorders / Q000453:epidemiology* / Q000523:psychology*; D012307:Risk Factors