Excellence in a story about another culture | The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

Must read for anyone working in the area of health | The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down | Anne Fadiman

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	• The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down Anne Fadiman Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 268 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Spirit Catches you and you fall down

Spectacular look at how cultures collide. Each side has the best of intentions but because of cultural beliefs and misunderstandings tragedy occurs.

Excellence in a story about another culture

This true story about a Central California Hmong family recounts the recent history of the Hmong people, and enlightens the reader about a culture vastly different than our own. The author describes the nomadic lifestyle of the Hmong, who have lived throughout the Southeast Asian mountaintops, settling until the land is exhausted and then moving on. They aligned with the United States during the VietNam conflict only to be abandoned to hostile local governments once it was over. Their survival stories are stunning, unimaginable, and unforgettable.

The immigrant family that settled in Central California includes a beloved young daughter with severe epilepsy. Heartbreaking events culminate in Western medicine's failure to be able to treat her despite the best- intended treatment and efforts by devoted physicians, and her parents' efforts to do all that they can to care for their most precious daughter. The challenge of bridging cultures is brought home in painful detail.

The Hmong culture is replete with beliefs in spirits and magical aspects that are fascinating. The title itself is the literal translation for the Hmong term for epilepsy. When the Spirit Catches you, you fall Down is not a quick read, yet it is an essential and gratifying reading for anyone who is practicing in health care, anyone who is visiting Southeast Asia, or anyone who wants to learn about far different human ways to perceive and live life.

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Must read for anyone working in the area of health

This is a moving, compelling and educational book. All sides of this cultural collision are portrayed with sensitivity and are convincing. I include it as required reading for my graduate seminar in public mental health. This is a must read for anyone working in the area of health and promotes reflection upon one's own cultural beliefs about health, illness and medicine.

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Not as good quality as promised.

Although I haven't read the book yet, I'm quite sure it's awesome.

But when I bought it, my purchase was based on the fact that it would be (as it was described) in very good quality. I surely got surprised then, when receiving the package, to find the book's cover being torn and with lots of unidentifiable spots and marks of crayons on it.

Still - it was fairly cheap, so it wasn't such a big deal.
But rest assured I won't recommend the seller to anyone.

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A revelation

As a professor at Vanderbilt, I read The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down when it was assigned for all students who were entering the medical school's first-year class. It was discussed in small groups during their orientation period on their arrival. It tells the story of a young child with epilepsy, her extended family and her Hmong community which had been transplanted into a welfare existence in Merced, California. It was well constructed to give perspective to a cultural dilemma, showing vividly the roots of culture in the history of the Hmong people and the tragic consequences of the dislocations created by circumstances totally out of their control.

The story alternates between the telling of the history of the Hmong people, the clinical and personal history of the patient, and the lives of many of those who cared for her. It is a worst-case scenario of "innocent" misunderstanding and the pressures of circumstance that permit it that is almost allegorical for our time. It was well chosen to challenge the medical students to examine their motivations for entering the profession and provided insight into the many lessons that they can learn only from knowing their patients thoroughly. For them it illustrated vividly how reliance on hearsay, first impressions and second-hand knowledge of cultures is not enough to guide proper interaction and treatment.

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Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction

When three-month-old Lia Lee Arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia's parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced, refugees from the CIA-run "Quiet War" in Laos. The Hmong, traditionally a close-knit and fiercely people, have been less amenable to assimilation than most immigrants, adhering steadfastly to the rituals and beliefs of their ancestors. Lia's pediatricians, Neil Ernst and his wife, Peggy Philip, cleaved just as strongly to another tradition: that of Western medicine. When Lia Lee Entered the American medical system, diagnosed as an epileptic, her story became a tragic case history of cultural miscommunication.

Parents and doctors both wanted the best for Lia, but their ideas about the causes of her illness and its treatment could hardly have been more different. The Hmong see illness aand healing as spiritual matters linked to virtually everything in the universe, while medical community marks a division between body and soul, and concerns itself almost exclusively with the former. Lia's doctors ascribed her seizures to the misfiring of her cerebral neurons; her parents called her illness, qaug dab peg--the spirit catches you and you fall down--and ascribed it to the wandering of her soul. The doctors prescribed anticonvulsants; her parents preferred animal sacrifices.

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