The Ubiquity of Ritual Healing

I write this chapter from the standpoint of a cultural anthropologist with a long-time interest in religion, ritual, and healing. Although traditional forms of healing for mental illness, including religion and ritual, are very widespread throughout the world, hardly any scientific studies have focused on them. The few studies that exist for India have concluded that around 80 per cent of the population makes use of religious healers for the treatment of mental health problems (Campion and Bhugra 1997; De Sousa and De Sousa 1984; Pakaslahti 1998; Quack 2012; Shah 1984). But pluralistic help-seeking for mental disorders is by no means limited to India: around 25 per cent of psychiatric patients in the USA – including for example 43 per cent of patients with anxiety disorder (Bystritsky et al. 2012) and 53 per cent of patients with depression (Wu et al. 2007) – use Complementary or Alternative Medicine (CAM) to address their problems. A study from the UK found that 42 per cent of the people from the Indian subcontinent living in Britain seek help from a healer before coming into contact with mental health services (Singh et al. 2013).