What Folklore Psychotherapy Can Teach us

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Abstract
Folklore psychiatry as the study of ideas, beliefs and practices concerning psychiatric conditions and their treatment maintained by popular tradition in ‘occidental’ cultures, is defined. Folklore psychiatry is differentiated from ethnopsychiatry, which concerns itself with psychiatry as practised in different cultures by the shaman or medicine-man, on the one hand, and on the other hand, from the study of the ways of the quack, the ‘fake’ and the humbugger. A series of studies undertaken at the Instituto Peruano de Estudios Psiquiátrico-Sociales (Peruvian Institute for Socio-Psychiatric Studies) are quoted and, from them, the possibility of outlining some of the factors being instrumental to the success of folklore therapy substantiated in many difficult cases. Among them, the use of practices like aversion therapy, the utilization of native plants and drugs unknown to our pharmacopoeia, etc., but, most important of all, the intuitive and very wise application of different psycho-therapeutic devices. Attention is especially paid to the use of many forms of group, patient-healer relationships, hypnosis and psychotherapy: family psychotherapy, psycho and sociodrama, community and social psychotherapy, etc. are commented upon. An example is offered reporting the treatment and cure of chronic alcoholism by native healers in the Northern coast of Peru. The need is emphasized to investigate these facts all over the world and the urgency to incorporate the knowledge of folklore psychiatry into the pregrade medical curriculum and especially into the residency programs of psychiatry.

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