Visceral Visions: Rethinking Embodiment and Desire in Global Mental Health

The globalization of biomedicine poses the problem of finding cross-culturally valid criteria for mental health. Undue pathologization is a major risk for global health, especially when diagnoses rely exclusively on Western nosology. This article focuses on the clinical conflation between involuntary mass possession and conversion disorder. Originally, the diagnosis of "conversion disorder" evolved from the notion of hysteria. Even though the category of hysteria disappeared from psychiatry many decades ago, some of its undergirding assumptions have survived under the new label of conversion. Namely, the assumption that hysteria/conversion is caused by repressed sexual desire is still implicit in widespread explanatory models for mass possession worldwide. Drawing upon an ethnography of demonic possession (grisi siknis) among the Afro-Indigenous Miskitos of Nicaragua, I argue that (1) the label of conversion is eurocentric and inappropriate for mass possession; and (2) emic perspectives on mass possession offer a critical counterpoint to rethink Euro-American and globalized understandings of embodiment and desire.