Mental Health at the Intersection of Religion and Psychiatry

For more than a century, anthropologists and psychiatrists engage in conversations concerning relationships between embodied wellbeing and religion. Taking account of shifting meanings of 'religion' in global modernities, the contributions reveal how historically and culturally embedded local encounters between psychiatry, religious experience, and ritual healing contribute to an increasing diversification of 'mental health'. The multitude of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches brought to the field in the global north and the global south introduce novel insights into current debates between clinical practitioners, ethnographic fieldworkers, and historians of psychiatry.