Traditional healing is not confined to mental health problems but is offered for virtually all known human ailments. However, it is probably more in psychiatry than in any order branch of medicine that a strong advocacy exists for the integration of traditional healing with Western medicine. It is not unlikely that this reflects, to some extent, the common scepticism about the scientific basis of mental disorders in general.

In examining partnerships between psychiatrists and traditional healers, this excellent book offers the reader a diversity of views to help them form their own opinion about the feasibility of such partnerships. It highlights the challenges of integrating traditional healing with biomedicine, especially given that the nature of the former is so diffuse and its practice often shrouded in secrecy. As the book shows, traditional healers are a diverse group of practitioners ranging from folk herbalists, to diviners and magic witch doctors. The unmet need for mental health services in most low- and middle-income countries, as described by Incayawar, provides the context in which some form of traditional healing sometimes becomes the only available source of help for patients and their families. But the process of integration of traditional healing with modern medicine has to go beyond necessity and begin with an attempt to understand what traditional healing can usefully offer and what harm it may unintentionally do. And that process can be a daunting one. Dan Mkize describes such an effort in South Africa where, given the post-apartheid political environment, an unthinking absorption of anything indigenous to Black Africans may have been a more populist approach. He and his colleagues knew the challenges would include ‘herbal medicine toxicity’ and the ‘secrecy’ of the practitioners of traditional healing, the same problems that sceptics of integration have often highlighted and which uncritical reification of traditional healing tends to dismiss.

So, the claim by Robert Lemelson that a common ground between traditional healing and biomedical treatment can be found in their common lack of efficacy for disorders such as obsessive–compulsive disorder and Tourette syndrome will have to be considered in the light of his other observation. Namely, many of the patients he studied with these conditions and who had consulted traditional healers had not only been offered ‘competing explanatory models’ for their illness, but had been subjected to various forms of treatment, including some harmful ones, which were based on these often contradictory explanations.

This book, organised into 20 chapters, touches on many of those core issues that psychiatrists and mental health professionals are concerned about when contemplating partnership with traditional healers: healing practices, the knowledge base of healers, the experience of collaboration between healers and psychiatrists, the efficacy of healing practices, psychotherapy and religious healing, among others. As Thachil and Bhugra remind us, traditional healing is not just relevant to healthcare systems in low- and middle-income countries, but is equally important in high-income countries where globalisation continues to widen the cultural context in which clinicians have to perform their duties of healing. With so many contributors from diverse areas of experience and expertise, the editors of this book have done a marvellous job of ensuring that this treasure trove of information is presented in a way that any lay reader can comprehend and enjoy.