“A Hospital on the Spiritual Plane”: Human-Spirit Entanglements in Brazilian Spiritist (Mental) Healthcare

The paper combines multi-sited ethnographic research and media anthropology. It highlights performative aspects of Spiritist contributions to (mental) healthcare in Brazil and beyond, focusing on human-spirit relations. These imply that afflicting spirits (obsession) involved in human suffering are afflicted themselves, and thus, treatment (disobsession) must address them, too. Since the establishment of biomedicine and psychiatry as scientific disciplines in 19th-century Europe, Spiritist approaches complemented (mental) health epistemologies and practices. Spiritists view humans as bio-psycho-social-spiritual beings, meaning that spiritual health and illness factors must be integrated with biomedical and socio-psychological treatments. This idea has gained significant recognition in Brazil, sustaining the public healthcare sector and recently reaching out transnationally, too. This contribution explores how Brazilian Spiritism practices and related media contents produce meaning, explanatory models, and metacommentaries regarding individual, socio-political, and spiritual aspects of (mental) health/care. It delves into mediumship practices that aim to treat not only humans, but also afflicting spirits, who are guided to a “hospital on the spiritual plane.”