Curiosity and Creative Experimentation Among Psychiatrists in India.

Medical anthropologists have not paid enough attention to the variation at the level of the individual practitioners of biomedicine, and anthropological critiques of biomedical psychiatry as it is practiced in settings outside the Global North have tended to depict psychiatrists in monolithic terms. In this article, we attempt to demonstrate that, at least in the case of India, some psychiatrists perceive limitations in the biomedical model and the cultural assumptions behind biomedical practices and ideologies. This paper focuses on three practitioners who supplement their own practices with local and alternative healing modalities derived from South Asian psychologies, philosophies, systems of medicine and religious and ritual practices.

Hegemony versus pluralism: Ayurveda and the Movement for Global Mental Health.

Under the aegis of the World Health Organization, the Movement for Global Mental Health and an Indian Supreme Court ruling, biomedical psychiatric interventions have expanded in India augmenting biomedical hegemony in a place that is known for its variety of healing modalities. This occurs despite the fact that studies by the WHO show better outcomes in India for people suffering from schizophrenia and related diagnoses when compared to people in developed countries with greater access to biomedical psychiatry. Practitioners of ayurvedic medicine in Kerala have been mounting a claim for a significant role in public mental health in the face of this growing hegemony.

"Just some spirits": the erosion of spirit possession and the rise of "tension" in South India.

Based on research among possessed and mentally ill patients and an examination of depictions of mental health issues in the popular media in the state of Kerala, India, this article examines apparent changes in the incidence and form of spirit possession and the proliferation of psychological idioms such as "tension" and "depression." These changes involve a decline in the incidence of possession as well as the homogenization of the identities of spirits: spirits that were described as having names and personalities a few decades earlier are now presented as more anonymous. The homogenization of spirits and the use of psychological idioms are interpreted as signaling an erosion of context and the ascendance of universal categories, which, according to some theorists, is a characteristic of "modernity.

Finding a fit: psychiatric pluralism in south India and its implications for WHO studies of mental disorder.

This article examines reports of improvement and decline in short-term follow-up interviews and long-term recollections among patients in three forms of therapy for mental illness in south India: ayurvedic (indigenous) psychiatry, allopathic (western) psychiatry, and religious healing. Interviews indicate that patients of all three therapeutic systems showed improvement after follow-up assessments and that several patients had radically divergent experiences with each of the three therapies; each therapy was found by some to be helpful and by others to be ineffective. These findings suggest that a greater availability of distinct forms of therapy makes it more likely that an individual will find a therapy to which he or she responds well, an insight that helps interpret World Health Organization-sponsored studies which examined mental disorders in developed and developing country sites and found a better outcome for these disorders in developing country centers.

The importance of a pleasant process of treatment: lessons on healing from South India.

This paper considers the significance of the positive and negative aesthetic qualities of different therapies--in other words, how "pleasant" (a term that is elaborated in the paper) it is to undergo various treatments. Interviews were conducted with patients undergoing three forms of healing for mental illness and related problems in the state of Kerala in southern India--ayurvedic (indigenous) psychiatry, allopathic (biomedical) psychiatry, and religious healing. Informants revealed concerns about the aesthetic process of therapy, reporting adverse reactions to allopathic treatments and in some cases asserting that they enjoyed ayurvedic procedures.