The Global Mental Health movement and its impact on traditional healing in India: A case study of the Balaji temple in Rajasthan

Abstract

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.