Religious Ritual Is Good Medicine for Indigenous Indian Conservation Refugees Implications for Global Mental Health

We tested whether religious ritual lessens or increases stress and anxiety among indigenous Sahariya conservation refugees recently displaced from a wildlife sanctuary in central India. Combining ethnography with structured survey and salivary analyte data (the stress hormone cortisol), we tracked di/stress over two 9-day periods before, during, and after Sahariya celebrations of the Hindu holidays of Holi and Navratri. Results show postritual improvement on all psychiatric and analyte data. The effects were larger for individuals who were wealthier and reported higher insecurity, suggesting that ritual healing might be impacted by infusions of cash and resources and also by the relative precariousness of the performance context. Likewise, health improvements were lower for individuals reporting higher anxiety and depression, implying that rites such as these are more likely to instill psychosomatic resilience in healthy individuals than to serve as a psychotherapeutic intervention for persons suffering more severely. Our results suggest that the local work of culture can serve as a potentially important source of health resilience in situations of high uncertainty, potentially preventing stress-and trauma-induced suffering, which should be taken into account by state and NGO organizations extending aid to the world's poor in similar disaster and refugee contexts.