Reassessing the Mental Health Treatment Gap: What Happens if We Include the Impact of Traditional Healing on Mental Illn
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FRESH FOCUS
Reassessing the Mental Health Treatment Gap: What Happens if We Include the Impact of Traditional Healing on Mental Illness? Tony V. Pham1,2,4 · Rishav Koirala3,4,5 · Milton L. Wainberg6 · Brandon A. Kohrt2,4,7 Received: 5 June 2020 / Accepted: 26 August 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract In this Fresh Focus, we reassess what the mental health treatment gap may mean if we consider the role of traditional healing. Based on systematic reviews, patients can use traditional healers and qualitatively report improvement from general psychological distress and symptom reduction for common mental disorders. Given these clinical implications, some high-income countries have scaled up research into traditional healing practices, while at the same time in low-and middle-income countries, where the use of traditional healers is nearly ubiquitous, considerably less research funding has studied or capitalized on this phenomena. The World Health Organization 2003–2020 Mental Health Action Plan called for government health programs to include traditional and faith healers as treatment resources to combat the low- and middle-income country treatment gap. Reflection on the work which emerged during the course of this Mental Health Action Plan revealed areas for improvement. As we embark on the next Mental Health Action Plan, we offer lessons-learned for exploring potential relationships and collaborations between traditional healing and biomedicine. Keywords Spirituality · Mental health · Shamanism · Medical anthropology · Traditional medicine · Ethnopsychology
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* Tony V. Pham [email protected] 1
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Duke University Medical Center, 2213 Elba Street, Durham, NC 27705, USA
2
Duke Global Health Institute, 310 Trent Drive, Durham, NC 27710, USA
3
University of Oslo, Problemveien 7, 0315 Oslo, Norway
4
Transcultural Psychosocial Organization (TPO) Nepal, Baluwatar, Kathmandu 44616, Nepal
5
Brain and Neuroscience Center Nepal, Krishna Dhara Marg, Kathmandu 44600, Nepal
6
Department of Psychiatry, New York State Psychiatric Institute, Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, NY 10032, USA
7
George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, 2120 L Street, NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20037, USA
“When a ripe apple falls, what makes it fall? Is it gravity, pulling it down to earth? A withered stalk? The drying action of the sun? Increased weight? A breath of wind? Or the boy under the tree who wants to eat it? Nothing is the cause of it. It is just the coming together of various conditions necessary for any living, organic, elemental event to take place. And the botanist who finds that the apple has fallen because of the onset of decay in its cellular structure, and all the rest of it, will be no more right or wrong than the boy under the tree who says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it to fall.” - Leo Tolstoy (2019),
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