Clinical psychology in the African context

Clinical psychology arrived late on the African continent, and is still fighting for recognition. This state of affairs coupled with shortage of personnel has resulted in paucity of research data and poor quality of research work. These facts are documented with a brief historical and literature survey. The author observes that most of the available work is descriptive and anecdotal, based, as it were, on intuition rather than systematic observation. Selected works on schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, children's adjustment problems, behaviour modification and influence are discussed in this light. Neither psychiatric nosology and diagnosis nor treatment methods and procedures have been effectively investigated. Problems of faulty design and misleading interpretation of research results abound. The conclusions which have been drawn from most empirical research data are probably not the most appropriate. It is therefore suggested that any worker wishing to rely on such available information may wish to re‐analyze the data and draw fresh conclusions from them. At best most of the available works should be regarded as helping to generate hypotheses for more systematic investigations. The need for training and encouraging more indigenous clinical psychologists to do research is emphasized.