Indigenous Dream Interpretation and Trauma-Related Avoidance Among Akan Help-Seekers: A Vignette Experiment on Divination-Based Causal Attribution and Treatment-Seeking

Akan divinatory practice treats certain dreams as ancestral communication that identifies a spiritual cause for misfortune, and this attribution may compete with biomedical explanations for trauma-related avoidance. The primary outcome was intended avoidance of trauma reminders; secondary outcomes were causal attribution and treatment-seeking intention. Ancestral-warning and witchcraft frames increased spiritual attribution relative to the biomedical frame, and spiritual attribution mediated the effect of frame on avoidance. Diviner-sourced interpretations produced higher avoidance than clinician-sourced interpretations only under the ancestral frame, indicating that source credibility and content interact rather than operate independently. The findings suggest that divination-based causal attribution is a modifiable mechanism linking indigenous dream interpretation to trauma-related avoidance, and that interventions addressing attribution may reduce avoidance without requiring rejection of indigenous cosmology.