The search for epistemic justice in mental health-related healing interventions foregrounds the contradictions between held-beliefs of traditional healers’ and the scientific knowledge that underpins medical practitioners’ co-creations in the same space. We argue it is the tolerated ambiguities by both belief- and knowledge-keepers that facilitate unique partnerships in healing people with severe mental illness globally.
We explore a Central Javan (Indonesian) case study of private residential in-patient care facility – Pendepokan Wali Siri – which has been the origin-site of a district-wide mental healthcare revolution. Pendepokan Wali Siri has operated for 50-years out of the home of Winong village elder, Mbah (grandfather) Marsiyo. He currently accommodates 89 patients, half of whom are physically restrained using a length of chain (pasung). Mbah Marsiyo draws on traditional animus belief structures in the Javanese worldview; he sees his land imbued with a sacred energy that calls people with a mental illness to it and heals them.
There now exists alternatives for in-patient care throughout the Kebumen district and better support for out-patient community care embedded in village structures and underpinned by a sharp increase in numbers of medically trained mental health personnel. However, Mbah Marsiyo’s facility has resisted federal government human-rights related mandates to close and continues to take on more patients, fulfilling an important community role in accommodating people with a severe mental illness that have so seriously transgressed their moral and social orders that they have been completely abandoned.
Medical approaches in isolation have not yet charted a course through the ethically fraught territory of long-term agitation and containment interventions for the “dangerously” mentally ill. We narrate through film clips the co-creation of a healing space at Mbah Marsiyo’s house, which tolerates ambiguities between belief and knowledge as it struggles to find a solution for the illness-afflicted, families and broader community.
