The contagion of mental illness: Insights from a Sufi shrine

Abstract

In this article, an anthropologist and a psychiatrist examine a Sufi shrine-based concept of affliction known as asrat (an “effect” in Hindi-Urdu, “difficulty” in Arabic) and related practices of healing in urban north India. Rather than being located in an individual body, asrat afflictions are shared, most often within a household or kinship group. Through surveys, clinical assessments, and ethnographic work, we track three different ways in which afflictions move between bodies, and the mechanisms at work in asrat healing processes. Rather than a “collectivist” concept of the psyche, we suggest that a key role of shrine-based therapeutic processes is to manage a “suspicion system,” related to experiences of psychic and economic injuries and conflict between intimates and kin. Through a multi-sited research design that moves across a leading Sufi shrine, an urban poor neighborhood in Delhi, and one of India's leading psychiatric facilities, we argue that within asrat-related processes, psychic vulnerabilities are addressed by “re-combining” relations through forms of inter-subjective attunement within a smaller segment of the kin group, potentially making symptoms and the burden of care and conflict more livable. We suggest that shrine-based concepts and practices may be cross-culturally significant, even for secular understandings of the inter-subjective dimensions of mental illness.