Partnerships with traditional and faith healers have long been promoted within mental health care, especially in Africa and to a lesser extent in Asia. Many such initiatives conceive traditional and faith healers as offering esoteric ritual and spiritual practices which stand in contrast to the certainties of medical science, framed through a contrast between ‘belief’ versus ‘knowledge’ (Tambiah 1990). However despite decades of research uncertainties remain as to the nature and cause of mental illness and controversies surround the effectiveness of biomedical and psychological treatments, particularly from the perspective of people with lived experience. The value and diversity of spiritual and ritual practice is often side-lined, with healers instrumentalised as complementary resources to psychiatric treatment.
Anthropological theory in mental health is commonly reduced to the elicitation of ‘explanatory models’ in order to identify a presumed cultural rationale behind healing practices and help-seeking. However anthropologists have long pointed to the ways in which both are marked by innovation, experimentation, cross-fertilisation and 'unknowing'. As public health systems buckle under resource scarcity and political neglect, spiritual and ritual practices may come increasingly to the fore, not only as adjuncts to psychiatric treatment but as offering meaning and comfort in the face of uncertainty.
In this panel we seek to foreground the uncertainties and imaginaries which underlie approaches to seeking treatment for mental illness from traditional and faith healers and formal mental health services. Questions to be considered include: What uncertainties, doubts and debates surround the search for healing in times of sickness? What imaginaries underlie formal and informal experiments in collaboration between health workers and healers? How do these shape the way in which such relationships are conceived and enacted? What new roles are emerging for healers and mental health workers in the face of renewed crisis for formal mental health care?
