Spirituality Versus Psychiatry: Why Many South Asians Turn to Religion Before Therapy or Psychiatric Medication - Behavioral Health News

South Asian mental health stigma and how cultural and religious factors influence mental health care choices.

Source: Spirituality Versus Psychiatry: Why Many South Asians Turn to Religion Before Therapy or Psychiatric Medication - Behavioral Health News

This article discusses the complex relationship between mental health and cultural and religious factors within South Asian communities, particularly in Western countries.

Opinion

I've come across other articles like this. They almost seem like soft sells for psychiatry. The old psychiatric bias that "we know best" usually comes through. Here, we find a more holistic approach. And that's pleasantly surprising as the author is a medical doctor transitioning to medical writing.

One problem, as I see it, is that psychiatry cannot prove or disprove the notion that some instances of so-called mental illness at least partly arise from sin, ignorance, worldliness, ungodliness, and evil spirits. That's a very old-fashioned idea most folks smirk at. To complicate matters, it seems some individuals experiencing discomfort, distress, and crisis do indeed imagine spiritual factors when more down-to-earth or perhaps neurological explanations appear to make more sense.

Some of the more common spiritually-based explanations:

• Spiritual Attack - An evil spirit actively tries to deceive, oppress or possess a person
• Curses and spells - Found in a variety of spiritual beliefs and practices
• Ancestral Curse - This Biblical idea entails that descendants can be cursed or treated as "second fiddle" due to an ancestor's choices and/or God's will
• Karmic Debt - Bad actions from a hypothesized past life bring negative results to a current life
• Ignorance or sin - Ignorance in this sense means being clued out about spiritual realities (i.e. avidya) while sin often implies some conscious choice, somewhere along the line

How do we discern a genuine spiritual attack or perhaps ancestral or karmic debt from an overactive imagination and unsound reasoning?

I leave this as an open question to remind us that emphasizing only one half of the equation seems unwise, even if American and American-influenced psychiatry has been doing so for decades.

—MC

Michael W. Clark wrote his PhD in Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa after completing an M.A. in Comparative Religion at Visva Bharati, W. Bengal, and a Hon. B.A. in Psychology and Sociology at Trent U, Peterborough.