130 chapter
8) Please give us any additional comments you feel we should know.If you want to know more details, please contact this address.We are told that, six months after our original interview, Lakshmi is doing
well, and there is confi dence that any further problems can be resolved through
engaging in devotional practices and visiting Chottanikkara. As refl ected in
this fortuitous assessment of Lakshmi’s condition, informants using religious
therapies reported the greatest degree of improvement in our follow-up inter-
views and questionnaires although their self-prognoses were only slightly bet-
ter than those of patients who were using allopathy or ayurveda.^19
Hanifa and His Wife: Relieving “Tension” at Beemapalli
Hanifa and his wife had been staying at Beemapalli and seeking relief for
Hanifa’s problems for a year and a half when Kavitha and I met them. Hanifa
is a 30-year-old Muslim man from Trivandrum District who worked for fi ve
years as a janitor in the Persian Gulf. Less educated than most of the patients
profi led in this chapter—although still well-educated by the standards of most
other Indian states—Hanifa remained in school through the 10th standard but
then failed the exam for the Secondary School Leaving Certifi cate. While in
the Gulf, Hanifa developed psychological problems—“tension” he and his wife
later called them using the English term—which led him to resign from his
job and return home. Hanifa described for us the nature of his problem and
the treatment he received from an allopathic psychiatrist:
Sleeplessness was one problem, and for that he would give medicine to be taken
at night. I should take pills at night, and get up only in the morning. He said not
to take that medicine in the morning. He will give me the prescription, and I will
get it from medical shop. Th en he asks me to meet him next “term,” and then I
will go and consult him. He will again give some prescription for medicine and
we will buy it and it will go on like that “continuously.”Like Abdul-Rahman, Hanifa’s recollection of his allopathic treatment
focuses on medication, affi rming Nunley’s (1996) observation that psychiatric
patients in India associate allopathic therapy primarily with the administra-
tion of drugs. Although he saw this psychiatrist in his private practice, where
therapists normally have more time to engage in talk therapy, Hanifa did not
give any indication that he received any psychotherapy or counseling. We
then inquired whether he had any diffi culties other than sleeplessness, and he