Cosmologies of Mental Health: Pentecostal Prayer Camps and Indigenous knowledge of Healing Mental Illness in Ghana
(Hardback)
Publishing Details
Cosmologies of Mental Health: Pentecostal Prayer Camps and Indigenous knowledge of Healing Mental Illness in Ghana
By (Author) Francis Ethelbert Kwabena Benyah
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Bloomsbury Academic
16th April 2026
United Kingdom
Classifications
Professional and Scholarly
Non Fiction
Indigenous peoples: religions, belief systems, cultural worldviews and spiritual
Physical Properties
Hardback
256
Width 156mm, Height 234mm
Description
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 Ghanas 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 in 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 bo Akademi University.
Author Bio
Francis Ethelbert Kwabena Benyah is an Independent scholar, Finland.
