Spiritual Afflictions and Disagreements. Unpacking ‘Collaboration’ Between Community Psychiatry and Spiritual Healing in Rural Southwestern Ghana

Ghana is today a key site for the development of cooperative relationships between public health care and traditional/spiritual healing. Framed as a major objective of the new legislation enacted in 2012 to ‘scale up’ psychiatric services in the country, trans-therapeutic collaboration has become a dominant topic in policy agendas, as well as in everyday discussions and scholarly publications. But what do we mean by ‘collaboration’? Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Nzemaland, this chapter complicates the paradigm of collaboration by looking at the multiple tensions and conundrums that arise in the everyday experience of practitioners and patients. What happens when patients and family members disagree with their therapists? When nurses and healers dissent even among themselves? And what can these disagreements tell us about collaboration? If, on the one hand, it is crucial to deconstruct the supposed incompatibility of mental health care with a traditional/spiritual medicine that has long been represented as radically other and ultimately ‘superstitious’, on the other hand, focussing on disagreement at the crossroads of different healing practices could be fruitful to reflect on the limits of psychiatric care and the model of collaboration currently proposed − in order to envision new, cooperative paths.