Movement of Illness & Mental Illness

When I was in high school, I worked in an equine veterinary clinic that utilized a combination of typical Western veterinary practices and practices of Traditional Chinese Medicine in order to provide healing, relief, and quality of life to the horses.  New clients were always skeptical of the combination, not just in the rationale of using both methods but in the knowledge of the limitations of each.  Without deeming one more competent or appropriate than the other, they were often concerned with determining the relationship between the two, which in the case of most of these clients, was the familiar Western medicine and the novel Traditional Chinese Medicine.  In the article “Pima and Papago Medicine and Philosophy” by Donald Bahr, he discusses the same type of negotiation of relationship between two different approaches to health and medicine that share the same goal of providing a certain quality of life and wellbeing.  He identifies the solution to this tension as being, within Piman medicine, the distinction between “wandering” and “staying” sicknesses.  This binary distinction allows each approach a specific realm in which to work for the ultimate betterment of the people.  It reminds me of a couple distinctions often made among epidemiologists, in which illnesses are classified first as interpersonally contagious or noncontagious and second as whether or not it passes between species.  Based on those classifications, the approaches to treatment will differ.  Within many approaches to health and medicine, the movement of disease, both within the body and between bodies, becomes critical in treatment and prevention.

After reading about the identification and descriptions of “wandering” and “staying” sicknesses, I was left wondering how different mental illnesses would fit into this distinction, or if they would even be regarded in a similar enough fashion to Western medicine that would require negotiation of the tensions that I can identify.  Upon my initial thought, I assumed that most mental illnesses would be treated as “staying” sicknesses, as they are never to pass from individual to individual and the Piman experience of mental illness is distinct from any other cultural experience of mental illness.  However, the idea that mental illness may pass from person to person continues to be considered and negotiated, even if medical professionals have dispelled the identification of mental illnesses as following patterns of traditional contagions.  Instead, the focus now lies on the social transmission of these conditions by contributing additions to a group’s symptom pool and by influencing patterns of thought and behavior.  However, whether or not mental illnesses have some degree of mobility, that does not disregard that the conditions are experienced within the intersections of various identities, thus separating different experiences of mental illness, even if they may theoretically transmittable.  I would love to have the opportunity to be able to discuss with someone more knowledgeable regarding Piman practices of medicine how mental illness would fit, if at all, into the construction of the relationship between Piman medicine and Anglo or Western medicine.