Overview

This open access book is based on a unique body of data on a hitherto understudied field of Pentecostal prayer camps and mental health in Ghana. The book investigates and presents empirically grounded cases of persons with mental illness and how they deploy religious resources at prayer camps in Ghana in dealing with their illness. Particularly, the book explores perceived causes of mental illness and how such perceptions influence health seeking behaviours. The book illustrates how the perceived causes of mental illness and the healing practices found at prayer camps in Ghana that are meant to deal with the illness appeal very much to Ghanaians because they resonate with indigenous worldviews. Through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of in-depth-interviews with persons afflicted with mental illness and practitioners, this book points out the varied ways in which prayer camps have become a source of authoritative knowledge in Ghana’s medical pluralistic society, serving as an “informal” health sector in the provision of health care to persons with mental illnesses. It further highlights the network of relationships between prayer camps and hospitals as new ground of training in “cultural competence” for clinicians in their field of practice in psychiatry. The book proposes the intermediate continuum approach as a new framework or lens for examining the broader role of religion and culture in mental health care. The approach aims at providing a common ground to merge the differences in previous approaches in the studies of culture and mental health and thereby undo the tensions, conflicts, and controversies inherent in such approaches. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Åbo Akademi University.

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9781350463479

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Reviews

In Cosmologies of Mental Health, we take a tour of the ubiquitous prayer camps of Ghana, where patients seek deliverance for their mental illness. Benyah treats sufferers as cultural beings who seek to reconnect with family, community and the spirit world, but who also show common sense, matching traditional therapies with allopathic care. This book will inspire supporters of therapeutic pluralism and advocates for the decolonization of psychiatry. * Jonathan Roberts, Mount Saint Vincent University, Canada * This book is a must-read for scholars, healthcare and religious practitioners, activists, and policy makers who care to get a more ingrained grasp of the intersectionality of prayer camps, faith and traditional healing praxis as alternative health reservoirs and complementary medicine in primary healthcare in Ghana in particular and Africa in general. * Afe Adogame, Princeton Theological Seminary, USA *

One of the most insightful recent works on African health and healing that brings an up-to-date reading of the wider scholarly literature to a focused ethnography of Ghanaian prayer centers. * John M. Janzen, University of Kansas, USA * In Cosmologies of Mental Health, we take a tour of the ubiquitous prayer camps of Ghana, where patients seek deliverance for their mental illness. Benyah treats sufferers as cultural beings who seek to reconnect with family, community and the spirit world, but who also show common sense, matching traditional therapies with allopathic care. This book will inspire supporters of therapeutic pluralism and advocates for the decolonization of psychiatry. * Jonathan Roberts, Mount Saint Vincent University, Canada * This book is a must-read for scholars, healthcare and religious practitioners, activists, and policy makers who care to get a more ingrained grasp of the intersectionality of prayer camps, faith and traditional healing praxis as alternative health reservoirs and complementary medicine in primary healthcare in Ghana in particular and Africa in general. * Afe Adogame, Princeton Theological Seminary, USA * This book offers a fresh perspective on the Akan’s integrated view of religion, health and well-being. The author sheds new light on issues that have not been previously clear and led to unsympathetic conclusions and weak policy decisions. Focusing on the enduring relevance of Christian Prayer Camps due to their alignment with traditional notions of wholeness, he provokes a new discussion of the spiritual understanding of mental health in non-Western cultures. * Abamfo O. Atiemo, University of Ghana, Ghana *

Author Information

Francis Ethelbert Kwabena Benyah is Assistant Professor at the Centre of African Studies and the Centre for Privacy Studies at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is also a Project Researcher in the Department for the Study of Religions at Åbo Akademi University in Turku, Finland.

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