The Global Mental Health movement and its impact on traditional healing in India: A case study of the Balaji temple in Rajasthan

Abstract

This article considers the impact of the global mental health discourse on India's traditional healing systems. Folk mental health traditions, based in religious lifeways and etiologies of supernatural affliction, are overwhelmingly sought by Indians in times of mental ill-health. This is despite the fact that the postcolonial Indian state has historically considered the popularity of these indigenous treatments regressive, and claimed Western psychiatry as the only mental health system befitting the country's aspirations as a modern nation-state. In the last decade however, as global mental health concerns for scaling up psychiatric interventions and instituting bioethical practices in mental health services begin to shape India's mental health policy formulations, the state's disapproving stance towards traditional healing has turned to vehement condemnation. In present-day India, traditional treatments are denounced for being antithetical to global mental health tenets and harmful for the population, while biomedical psychiatry is espoused as the only legitimate form of mental health care. Based on ethnographic research in the Hindu healing temple of Balaji, Rajasthan, and analysis of India's mental health policy environment, I demonstrate how the tenor of the global mental health agenda is negatively impacting the functioning of the country's traditional healing sites. I argue that crucial changes in the therapeutic culture of the Balaji temple, including the disappearance of a number of key healing rituals, are consequences of global mental health-inspired policy in India which is reducing the plural mental health landscape.

Global Mental Health: Interdisciplinary challenges for a field in motion

“…In this rendering, traditional healing is seen as the epistemic and moral ''other'' to biomedicine -a direct competitor for authority and resources not merely an addition to a pluralistic health care system, as GMH practitioners often stress. Sood (2016), for example, describes how a Hindu healing temple in Rajasthan underwent profound changes in its therapeutic culture due to GMH inspired rightsbased policies that led to ''the disappearance of a number of key healing rituals'' and reduced the diversity of ''the plural mental health landscape'' (p. 766).…”

Genealogies and Anthropologies of Global Mental Health

“…Critical anthropologists and others are concerned that that global mental health arouses political sentiments akin to earlier colonial suspicion against traditional healing and epistemologies (Cooper 2015). The wide treatment gap attributed to the global South is seen by some to be ''structurally blind'' (Sax 2014) to ritual healing, with the result that the latter is sometimes criminalized (Sood 2016) and the mental health care provided by already existing alternatives to psychiatry are ignored, destroyed (Davar 2017) or not counted as ''treatment'' within the confines of 'evidence-based' definitions (Bartlett, Garriott, and Raikhel 2014;Davis 2018). Scholars like Murphy Halliburton attribute the well-known reports of better recovery rates for schizophrenia and other mental illnesses in low-income countries (Hopper et al 2007) to this pluralism (Halliburton 2004).…”

A Return to “The Clinic” for Community Psychology: Lessons from a Clinical Ethnography in Urban American Indian Behavioral Health

“…Recent efforts by clinical ethnographers, for example, have coalesced around critiquing the wanton export of clinical knowledge and practice around the globe (see Burgess, ; Jain & Jadhav, ; Jain & Orr, ), an emancipatory agenda that strongly resonates with CP. Using ethnographic data and clinical expertise, these researchers have offered detailed pictures of community life and hardship in diverse settings to highlight how conflicts between local culture and global mental health can result in detrimental consequences for people in these settings (e.g., Jain & Jadhav, ; Sood, ; Varma, ). Moreover, when conducted in collaborative clinic partnerships, ethnography can also generate productive local sites of clinical‐community dialogue that parallel national debates around re‐envisioning the clinic and its role in supporting health and wellness for individuals and communities.…”