Religion, Ethnicity, and Community Mental Health: Service Provision and Identity Politics in an Unplanned Egyptian Community

Abstract

Successful community mental health programs depend on strong social networks and cooperation between resource providers, both of which are complex products of local culture and history. The results of an ethnographic study of an unplanned urban neighborhood in Cairo, Egypt emphasize the importance of the political, social and historical context to community service development. The informal nature of the community, characterized by migrants from different ethnic and religious groups and a relative lack of governmental services, produced a culture of service provision that indirectly serves to accentuate religious and ethnic tensions. The findings are relevant not only to the developing world, but also to community program development in large, multicultural urban centers anywhere.