Cosmologies of Mental Health : Pentecostal Prayer Camps and Indigenous Knowledge of Healing Mental Illness in Ghana

This open access book is based on a unique body of data on a hitherto understudied field of Pentecostal prayer camps and mental health in Ghana.

The book investigates and presents empirically grounded cases of persons with mental illness and how they deploy religious resources at prayer camps in Ghana in dealing with their illness. Particularly, the book explores perceived causes of mental illness and how such perceptions influence health seeking behaviours. The book illustrates how the perceived causes of mental illness and the healing practices found at prayer camps in Ghana that are meant to deal with the illness appeal very much to Ghanaians because they resonate with indigenous worldviews.

Through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of in-depth-interviews with persons afflicted with mental illness and practitioners, this book points out the varied ways in which prayer camps have become a source of authoritative knowledge in Ghana’s medical pluralistic society, serving as an “informal” health sector in the provision of health care to persons with mental illnesses. It further highlights the network of relationships between prayer camps and hospitals as new ground of training in “cultural competence” for clinicians in their field of practice in psychiatry. The book proposes the intermediate continuum approach as a new framework or lens for examining the broader role of religion and culture in mental health care. The approach aims at providing a common ground to merge the differences in previous approaches in the studies of culture and mental health and thereby undo the tensions, conflicts, and controversies inherent in such approaches.


The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Åbo Akademi University.