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This page is an AI-assisted Turkish summary of the study presented at the 26th World Congress of Psychiatry. The study belongs to the presenting authors; please refer to the original source when citing it.

EV1342

Negotiating mental health: interactions between biomedical psychiatry and local healing traditions in Nepal

NEGOTIATING MENTAL HEALTH: INTERACTIONS BETWEEN BIOMEDICAL PSYCHIATRY AND LOCAL HEALING TRADITIONS IN NEPAL

In a psychiatric hospital in Nepal, the boundary between biomedicine and traditional healing is not fixed but is a site of negotiation, endorsed through architecture, variably enforced by clinicians, and crossed by nurses and families.

The study aims to examine how traditional healing (shamanism, Ayurveda, Tibetan medicine, and spiritual healing) is negotiated in both the clinical practice and physical spaces of a psychiatric hospital. Twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork were conducted at Lagankhel Mental Hospital in Nepal, with data collected through participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 10 psychiatrists, 3 nurses, 5 staff members, and 7 patients and their caregivers. The findings were organized into four themes: sanctioned sacred space, represented by an officially established Hindu temple and a Buddha statue on the hospital grounds; cultural brokerage, in which nurses from rural backgrounds privately acknowledged spirit possession and discreetly suggested that families combine rituals with psychiatric medication; therapeutic communities, in which caregivers shared experiences of religious healing and groups of women visited places of worship together every Saturday; and pharmaceutical blessing, reflected in accounts of medication effects being complemented by a religious leader’s blessing. Differences were observed among clinicians: some regarded prayer as therapeutic, while others considered it disruptive and inappropriate. The discussion notes that the rejection of traditional practices was not uniform across the institution, that the temple and statue indicated a sanctioned pluralism consistent with Kleinman’s model of local health care systems, that individual psychiatrists overrode institutional accommodation, and that nurses’ tacit brokerage remained hidden from physicians. The authors conclude that the boundary between biomedicine and traditional healing is not fixed but open to negotiation; this suggests that patients’ and families’ pursuit of multiple forms of healing needs to be addressed explicitly in cross-cultural clinical practice.

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