Some Thoughts and Reflections on Therapy and Healing Across Cultures
Abstract
Nearly all my experience as a psychiatrist (before I became an academic) had been in or around UK’s capital city, London. I trained as a psychiatrist in the 1960s while working in asylums (called by then ‘mental hospitals’) located just outside London and later worked at a teaching hospital in London itself; and finally, as deinstitutionalisation took hold, I worked in a multi-disciplinary team running a community-based service linked to a district hospital serving a multicultural part of London. The change from asylum-care to community-care that happened in the 1970s occurred soon after the ‘medication revolution’—the advent of neuroleptic drugs when hopes were raised that mental illness would be cured by drug therapies. These changes led to the current mental health system in the UK where specific diagnosis and packages of treatment mostly centred around medication—a technological approach—take precedence over caring and human relationships as the bedrock of what people with mental turmoil and in extreme states of social suffering need.
References
Fernando, S. (2014). Mental health worldwide: Culture, globalization and development. Basingstoke, UK & New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Foucault, M. (2006). History of madness. J. Khalfa (Ed.). (J. Murphy & J. Khalfa, Trans.). London, UK & New York, NY: Routledge.
Halliburton, M. (2004). Finding a fit: Psychiatric pluralism in South India and its implications for WHO studies of mental disorder. Transcultural Psychiatry, 41(1), 80-98.
Kleinman, A. (1977). Depression, somatization and the “new cross cultural psychiatry.” Social Science and Medicine, 11, 3-10.
Kusumaratne, S. (2005). Indigenous medicine in Sri Lanka. A sociological analysis. Nugegoda, Sri Lanka: Sarasavi Publishers.
Obeyesekere, G. (1977). The theory and practice of psychological medicine in the Ayurvedic tradition. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 1, 155-181.
Raguram, R., Venkateswaram, A., Ramakrishna, J., & Weiss, M. (2002). Traditional community resources for mental health: A report of temple healing from India. British Medical Journal, 325, 38-40.
Shoenberg, E. (1972). A hospital looks at itself. London: Bruno Casirer.
Vogt, B. (1999). Skill and trust: The Tovil healing ritual of Sri Lanka as a culture- specific psychotherapy. Sri Lanka Studies 6. (M. H. Kohn, Trans.). Amsterdam, NL: VU University Press.
Watters, E. (2010). Crazy like us. The globalization of the Western mind. London, UK: Constable & Robinson.
