ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces aspects of the diversification of mental healthcare and related theoretical approaches. It sets the scene with a narrative from the onset of the author's fieldwork and his positionality in the field, the book's relevance, questions, aims, and principal argument. It frames the context of Spiritist mental healthcare, the research sites, and methodological considerations regarding the challenges of sensory and auto-ethnography as examples of engaged anthropology. It provides a general discussion of mental healthcare at the intersection of religion and medicine; three main perspectives will be addressed: (1) Healing Cooperation between Spiritism, psychiatry, and biomedicine as an approach to meet contemporary challenges of mental health provision and health policies, (2) the Aesthetics of Healing as an innovative conceptual tool to investigate sensory and embodied aspects of therapeutic practices and Spiritist mental healthcare in particular, and (3) Translocal Relations to illustrate transcultural and global networks, entanglements, and transformations of traveling therapeutic models. In this regard, the leitmotifs of “voices” and “sixth sense” are introduced.
