Alternative and Complementary Practices for Mental Health Care in the CDMX: The Voice of Therapists and Storekeepers

Around the world, many people use or have used complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). According to the World Health Organization, 80% of people in developing countries solve their most common health problems through CAM, and according to the Panamerican Health Organization, traditional healers are the main healthcare providers for a considerable amount of the indigenous Latin American population. We interviewed 81 therapists and 8 storekeepers living in Mexico City. Their perceptions, definitions, and analyses of mental health and illness were studied. The participants mentioned women as the most frequent type of consultant, but also as a key factor in the family’s health and care-seeking. They consider that, with their resources, they can strengthen mental health but that mental illness (mostly interpreted as insanity or psychosis) is delicate to manage and, therefore, they prefer to leave it in the hands of biomedicine. It was said that it is impossible to separate health from mental health because health is holistic—it is a balance of body/mind/spirit/environment/community. Participants suggested that biomedicine and CAM should work together, where biomedical are also taught psychosocial knowledge, communication skills, and natural resources. Particularly in mental health, the needs are many. The therapeutic offer is scarce, in addition to the stigma and meanings surrounding the mind and its manifestations, which motivates the search for various resources for both formal and informal care and, as mentioned by the participants, from the MACs, the need for complementarity with biomedicine is recognized given the complexity of the aspects of health and mental illnesses. Much remains to be done, and it is no easy task to achieve this field of joint work, but studies such as this one aim to make visible the voices of those involved in health care through the so-called complementary and alternative forms, in order not to forget them within the pending issues in mental health legislation.