International / Schizophrenia Category

Title of Winning Proposal: Traditional Healers’ Management of Schizophrenia in Busoga, Uganda

Dr. Catherine Abbo is a staff psychiatrist heading the Forensic Unit at Butabika Psychiatric Hospital in Uganda. She received her medical degree from Makerere University Medical School in 1998. 

Following her internship, Dr. Abbo joined the same University for a master’s program in Psychiatry and graduated in 2003 as a psychiatrist.

Dr. Abbo has now enrolled for a Ph.D. joint program at Makerere University and Karolinska Institute of Sweden sponsored by Sida/SAREC. Her area of interest in research is Transcultural Psychiatry, specifically, traditional medical practices and mental illness. For her Ph.D. thesis, she intends to study the outcome of African traditional healing practices in mental illness. With this award, Dr. Abbo will be able to study schizophrenia, specifically the traditional diagnostic system and treatment outcome using African traditional medical practices.

After this research experience, Dr. Abbo hopes to continue in the field of Transcultural Psychiatry and start up a Transcultural Psychiatry Unit in her hospital’s Department of Psychiatry, with the main objective to research and provide training in Transcultural Psychiatry.

She is married and has two children, age eight and two years old.