92 chapter
In an eff ort to foreground the lives and health problems of people I spoke
with, excerpts from interviews will be presented according to the order in
which they originally occurred. I indicate connections to issues in other sec-
tions of this study and comment on features of culture and the contingencies
of life in Kerala as they arise, but I do not splice together quotations extempo-
raneously to fi t into themes. At the end of this chapter, I present an overview
of the themes that arise in relating the stories of these individuals. Th is syn-
opsis is located at the end of the chapter so as not to orient the reading of this
material towards these issues and instead to highlight the narratives of illness
and the diversity of issues involved in shaping a psychological affl iction.
Two patients from each of the three forms of healing—ayurvedic psych-
iatry, allopathic psychiatry and religious healing—were selected to represent
a variety of features that are socially, politically and medically signifi cant in
the local context, such as age, religion, gender, inpatient or outpatient sta-
tus, socioeconomic situation and other characteristics. In addition, an eff ort
was made to include interviews that were particularly rich in detail, con-
tained a variety of perspectives (such as where patients and multiple fam-
ily members are interviewed) and featured a follow-up interview. Not all
these features could be represented in every case, however. Th e fact that both
ayurvedic patients are female, for example, is not indicative of the nature of
ayurveda but rather is an artifact of trying to ensure that Hindus, Muslims,
Christians, good informants, working class people and others are included in
this section.
When presenting a “patient” or “informant,” I am, more accurately, relating
the story of the person suff ering distress and her friends or family members,
who accompany the patient during therapy and who often do most of the
speaking. Th is is the manner in which patients presented themselves to ther-
apists and to my assistants and me for interviews. I was immediately tempted
to try to interview patients alone, separately from their caretakers, to get what
I assumed to be the authentic experience of the person suff ering distress. But
such a move would amount to editing out culture. It would, for example, partly
obscure the contiguous or socially-dispersed self that is presented by patient
and caretaker. Although realms of individual autonomy exist in Kerala and
aspects of the individual self may have been submerged by my choice of inter-
view style, I felt that by interviewing patients alone I would be imposing an
assumption that a truer self is found in a private setting or at some interior
level, an assumption that is problematic in India and may well be problematic
in any cultural setting.^1 Nevertheless, in some cases, such as rare instances
when individuals visited healers unaccompanied by friends or family, inter-
views were conducted with the patient alone.