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The Conference
Objectives
- Create a space for sharing experiences of using traditional medicines to resolve mental health problems, and to reflect upon these experiences.
- Engage representatives of public institutions and international agencies to pay more attention to the resource potential of traditional medicines in setting policies on mental health and especially in addressing the problems of drug use.
- Create an American Regional Network that will continue to explore this field of study and its possible applications in health policies.
Background
Traditional medicines are used to treat mental health problems, which have often been viewed as culturally specific problems, and so these treatments have been seen as effective only in this specific context. However, empirical medical experience appears to demonstrate the opposite, indicating instead that the therapeutic techniques of indigenous or native peoples have a transcultural dimension, responding to human constants that are invariable or archetypal. Moreover, the instruments employed by TM are sufficiently adaptable to offer innovative solutions in areas where conventional medicine is deficient, such as in the treatment of addictions.
When official or conventional medicine agrees to consider the contributions of traditional medicines to mental health, it comes up against a series of resistances or difficulties that are worth mentioning here. For example:
- The lack of differentiation between mental and spiritual dimensions in TM.
- The frequent use of psychoactive plants or substances, and of techniques to induce modified states of consciousness.
- The voluntary and necessary subjectivity involved in the therapeutic relationship, both by the patient and the therapist, which is contrary to the recommended supposed scientific objectivity.
- The supremacy of experience over technique in TM therapeutic practices.
At the same time, currently many westerners are engaged in an erratic search for solutions to their mental, moral, existential or spiritual suffering. They travel further and further away from their own cultural contexts in search of this, reaching traditional societies to find shamans, healers and other practitioners of these techniques. Aside from the frequent intercultural incomprehension that results, this movement has produced a dubious form of neo-shamanism and shamanic tourism that threatens to degenerate Traditional Medicines and destroy them. In conclusion, the mental health of indigenous peoples is also under threat.
Numerous young researchers interested in carrying out research in this field have great difficulty finding academic support, a way to apply what they have learnt, and adequate funding. Meanwhile, this is a vast area and there exists an urgent need to explore it.
| Official Language: Spanish. The Conference plans at least simultaneous translation of the papers from French and English to Spanish. As far as possible, will extend this system of translation (from Spanish to English and French). |