Sood Anubha
Southern Methodist University, USA.
Transcult Psychiatry. 2016 Dec;53(6):766-782. doi: 10.1177/1363461516679352.
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.
本文探讨了全球心理健康话语对印度传统治疗体系的影响。基于宗教生活方式和超自然折磨病因的民间心理健康传统，在印度人心理健康欠佳时，是他们极为普遍的选择。尽管后殖民时期的印度政府历来认为这些本土疗法的流行是倒退的，并宣称西方精神病学是唯一符合该国作为现代民族国家抱负的心理健康体系。然而在过去十年中，随着全球对扩大精神科干预措施以及在心理健康服务中推行生物伦理实践的关注开始影响印度的心理健康政策制定，政府对传统治疗的不赞同态度已转变为强烈谴责。在当今的印度，传统治疗因与全球心理健康原则相悖且对民众有害而遭到谴责，而生物医学精神病学则被奉为心理健康护理的唯一合法形式。基于对拉贾斯坦邦巴拉吉神庙印度教治疗场所的人种志研究以及对印度心理健康政策环境的分析，我展示了全球心理健康议程的主旨如何对该国传统治疗场所的运作产生负面影响。我认为，巴拉吉神庙治疗文化的关键变化，包括一些关键治疗仪式的消失，是受全球心理健康启发的印度政策的结果，该政策正在减少多元的心理健康格局。
