introduction 33
Trivandrum Ayurveda College after giving a lecture on medical anthropology
or chatting with psychiatrists after interviews at the Trivandrum Medical
College, I found myself in regular dialogue with healers regarding problems of
psychopathology and healing.
I also observed healing methods employed by the three therapeutic systems
I was examining, and I monitored public discourse on mental health by
reviewing popular magazines, television shows and movies and by attending
conferences and workshops on psychological topics. Research sites included
a government-run ayurvedic psychiatric hospital, two private ayurvedic psy-
chiatric practices, three allopathic psychiatric hospitals (two public and one
private), one Hindu temple, one Muslim mosque and one Christian church.
Although I speak Malayalam well enough for everyday, routine conversa-
tions, I was not profi cient enough to converse smoothly in the vernacular on
complex, personal topics. Th us, for patient interviews I required the assistance
of T. R. Bijumohan “Biju,” who worked as a clerk at an ayurveda college, and
Kavitha N. S. and Benny Varghese, who were both graduate students in psych-
ology at universities in Kerala.
We conducted semi-structured and unstructured interviews with patients
and the relatives who accompanied them. Semi-structured interviews focused
on the patient’s illness history, the current status and features of their illness,
the reasons the patient and caretakers chose the therapies they used, their
reasons for changing therapies, their experiences with diff erent therapies,
their views about the cause of the patient’s problem and their own progno-
sis for the problem. (Th e semi-structured interviews utilized the questions
reproduced in Appendix A.)^30 In unstructured interviews, patients and their
families had more latitude to determine the course of the conversation and
raise issues that may not have been addressed in the more structured inter-
views. However, accepted and polite conversational style in Malayalam did not
allow us to proceed directly through the semi-structured questions, and thus
conversations between the informants, my assistants and myself during these
interviews addressed the prepared questions but also regularly diverged into
other topics.
All but one of the 28 unstructured interviews conducted were recorded on
tape and transcribed. Most of the 72 semi-structured interviews were recorded
with handwritten notes, but 11 of these interviews were taped. Th us, I have
verbatim transcripts for 38 out of the 100 patients interviewed. At least six
months after the original interviews, we attempted to conduct follow-up
interviews with as many patients as possible to learn of any change in the sta-
tus of their illness and their healing experience. My assistants and I obtained
follow-up information on 25 patients either by interview or by mail-returned