الفهرس 
IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
Abstract
Schizophrenia is a collection of mental and behavioral phenomena, it’s features include abnormal perceptions in the form of hallucination, aberrant inferential judgments that resulted in extraordinary beliefs and delusions, distorted thought construction manifest as disorder of language, unusual, restricted emotion, abnormalities in hedonia and volition, cognitive problems including memory and executive functions disturbances
The length of time of active psychosis before intervention varies, this duration is called DUP ” duration of untreated psychosis”, the longer is the DUP, the worse is the prognosis of schizophrenia, several researchers have attempted strategy to intervene before onset of overt psychosis, at a time when patient is experiencing prodromal signs of illness, the earlier the intervention, the less the disease deterioration and the resultant disabilities (Jones and Buckley, 2006).
Traditional Medicine: According to WHO (2002), traditional medicine is the sum total of the knowledge, skills and practices based on the theories, beliefs and experiences indigenous to different cultures, whether explicable or not, used in the maintenance of health, as well as in the prevention, diagnosis, improvement and treatment of physical and mental illnesses (Koon, 1999).
The WHO (2003) stated that the popularity of traditional mental healers is due to the following reasons-confidence in the system: the explanations offered to the clients as the cause of their illnesses are more acceptable; affordability: the cost is cheaper and flexible.
There is at present a gap between psychiatrists, mental health professionals and people with mental disorders. This is true of many low-income countries. This greatly affects seeking psychiatric advice behavior and causes delay in both diagnosis and management which will lead to poor prognosis and increase the burden of mental disorders. Psychiatrists and other service providers need to make more effort to reach those patients who require psychiatric management and this will be achieved primarily by increasing public awareness about mental disorders.
In our study, we were aiming to assess the rate of traditional healers consultation by patients with schizophrenia, to highlight the socio demographic and clinical correlates for this group, also, we were aiming to assess the impact of this kind of consultation on seeking psychiatric advice and thus on duration of untreated psychosis.
The main findings were that 41.81% reported consulting traditional healers; these results were consistent with previous Egyptian studies that found this high percentage of patients seeking traditional healers’ help, they were attributing the symptoms to multiple causes: 50 patient (21.55%) believed that they are possessed by Jin, 19 patient (8.19) thought it is due to envy and 28 patient (12.07%) believed that someone made black magic against them and that is the cause of their illness.
Main symptom that leads to consulting traditional healer was hallucinations in 51.55%, secondly by 29.9% consulted due to delusions, 9.28% due to bizarre behavior and 9.28% due to formal thought disorder.
Regarding causes of preferring traditional healing, most common cause in 30.39% was acceptance from society, in 24.74% as they are affordable, in 16.49% due to easy accessibility to psychiatric service