Depression in Kerala: Ayurveda and Mental Health Care in 21st Century India by Claudia Lang

Author:Claudia Lang [Lang, Claudia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138482807
Google: WIsetAEACAAJ
Publisher: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2018-11-15T00:02:58.758522+00:00

The reconfiguration of bhutavidya as Ayurvedic psychiatry

Out of the eight branches of Ayurveda described in the classical texts Caraka Samhita, Sushruta Samhita, and Asthangahrdayam that are authoritative for Ayurvedic teaching and practice there is no one branch that focuses explicitly on mental illness. Instead, the texts deal with the theory and treatment of mental health problems in the context of two branches of specialization: (1) kaya chikitsa [general medicine] and (2) graha chikitsa [treatment of grasping entities] or bhutavidya [knowledge of the bhuta – a being, but this also denotes a ghost, demon, spirit or simply the past tense]. These texts differentiate between physiologically endogenous unmada86 [madness, mental illness] and exogenous unmada. While the former denotes “madness” due to an imbalance of one or more of the three doshas [humours or principles], the latter denotes “madness” with reference to external entities. Today, the theory and practice of Ayurvedic psychiatry mainly focuses on endogenous unmada and either discards or is ambiguous towards exogenous unmada. In contemporary Ayurvedic psychiatric clinical practice and teaching, but also in efforts to popularize Ayurvedic psychiatry, practitioners focus on endogenous dosha-based unmada largely to the exclusion of exogenous unmada. Most Ayurvedic psychiatrists do not discuss bhutas or grahas [grasping entities], and if they do they reinterpret them as mere metaphors for sudden changes in behaviour, as psychotic features or personality disorder. Indeed, the very notion of the existence of exogenous unmada and bhutavidya (or graha chikitsa) has given rise to a highly controversial debate among Ayurvedic psychiatrists.

The crux of the disagreement is the question of whether or not the bhutas or grahas are to be understood as possessing entities or as mere metaphors describing sudden changes in behaviour or character (Lang and Jansen 2013; Naraindas 2014a). According to college-trained Ayurvedic psychiatrists, the description of the grahas in the Ayurvedic classic texts [samhitas] is metaphorical but has been misinterpreted in recent decades in the context of possession. This interpretation is related to the narrative of an ancient scientism that morphed into medieval superstition and irrationality, the ghosts, esoterica and contradictions of which must be cleansed from modern Ayurveda (Langford 2002). The classical texts themselves are highly ambivalent on this point (Weiss 1977).87 A related question, which presumes the ontological existence and agency of spirits, is whether the motivation for a bhuta or graha to possess a human being is located in the spirit itself, in the faulty behaviour of the afflicted person, or in a malevolent third person as in the practice of sorcery and counter-sorcery. Finally, the question of whether or not bhutavidya has ever been practised as a branch of Ayurveda is highly controversial.

Scholars of Indian medicine are likely to agree with a translation of bhutavidya as something like knowledge of existent beings “most of which are invisible or assumed to be inhabiting other beings […] and are believed to cause various diseases, including certain forms of mental illness” (Smith 2006, 472). Alongside these ontological transfigurations of bhuta and graha, all Ayurvedic psychiatrists with whom I

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