Affiliation:
1. Jawaharlal Nehru University, Deakin University
Abstract
This chapter, which is an ethnography of a psychosomatic department
in a German hospital, functions as a foil to the rest of the volume. It
allows us to ask the following: Why is the movement for global mental
health preoccupied with the Global South? Why does mental health in
the Global South primarily revolve around the psycho-pharmaceutical,
while psychosomatic medicine, which in the German context is a separate
discipline divorced from psychiatry, is normatively built on eschewing
psycho-pharmaceuticals? Why is mental health in the Global South built
on the distinction between superstition (past lives, trance, possession – in
short, ‘rituals’ invoking the spirits and the dead) and science (psychiatry,
rational diagnosis, asylums, drugs), while in Germany the two are often
fused?
Publisher
Amsterdam University Press