Psychiatrists and Traditional Healers || Health-Seeking Behavior for Psychiatric Disorders in North India
✍ Scribed by Incayawar, Mario; Wintrob, Ronald; Bouchard, Lise
- Publisher
- John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
- Year
- 2009
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 189 KB
- Edition
- 1
- Category
- Article
- ISBN
- 0470516836
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
In low-income countries where community-based psychiatric services are still scarce, mental health resources are available from traditional practitioners, often little known to official psychiatry. In the culturally rich and medically pluralistic societies of India, these include both secular codified medicines and varieties of oral religious healing traditions.
This chapter, based on over a decade of field research, explores the healing tradition at the increasingly popular Hindu temples of Balaji in Rajasthan, 270km from Delhi, in North India. They do not cater only to local treatment needs. Help-seeking for mental disorders, culturally known as 'spirit illness', is cross-regional, interstate and occasionally transnational (Hindus from Nepal, from United Kingdom and United States). The majority of patients is literate, urban and has had prior consultations with allopathic doctors. The pilgrimage setting of the temples is non-stigmatizing and a large network of healers offers specialized professional help for the suffering and their families. The idiom of spirit illness functions as a culturally relevant discourse for therapeutic communication and intervention. Traditional healing in North Indian medical pluralism appears as a widely used secondary option for those who suffer from mental disorders.