Cognitive Foundations of Community Mental Healthcare: The Role of Local Institutions and Practices

Belief in the supernatural plays a significant role in mental health, and a functional approach—examining what supernatural beliefs do for people—offers a way to reconcile believers and non-believers. Across cultures, supernatural agents have historically supported human psychological functioning. In India, where supernatural entities are pervasive, this perspective is especially relevant for psychologists. The chapter first discusses three aspects of this approach: community mental health, embedding the supernatural in collective life, and narrative forms. It then presents evidence from a case study of deity institutions in Himachal Pradesh, which are tied to physical, social, and mental well-being and foster cooperative action. Four aspects of supernatural agents are explored: diversity, order, learning, and image, the last involving memory processes like storage, organization, and retrieval of associations.

Study at a glance

Abstract

The psychological enquiry in India needs to focus on belief in the supernatural, and its role in mental health. Perhaps a key to this new direction lies in the functional approach to supernatural beliefs. The functional approach is most appropriate for creating a setting for reconciliation between believers and non-believers in the supernatural. The proposal rests on a thesis that in every culture all over the world supernatural agents have allied in enabling human psyche. This quest assumes much greater significance for psychologists in a country where the landscape is saturated with supernatural entities. There are two main parts in this chapter. The first part presents three aspects of this alternative approach: the viewpoint of community mental health, the embedding of the supernatural in collective, and ways of its narration. The second part provides evidence on these issues by taking a case study of the institution of deity in the state of Himachal Pradesh, which is closely associated with the physical, social and mental well-being of people, and in addition a space for cooperative action. Four aspects of supernatural agents explored include: diversity, order, learning, and image. While the first three aspects largely relate to the social and religious context, the fourth aspect image or representation of supernatural looks into the memory processes such as storage, organization and retrieval of associations in mind.