Psychedelic Therapy

An ethnography of a German hospital's psychosomatic department challenges the assumptions underlying the global mental health movement. The chapter asks why that movement focuses on the Global South and relies on psycho-pharmaceuticals, while German psychosomatic medicine normatively avoids them. It also questions why mental health in the Global South is framed as a contrast between superstition (rituals, spirits, trance) and science (psychiatry, drugs), whereas in Germany these categories are often fused.

Study at a glance

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?