Wèrè and the Ontological Politics of Global Mental Health: Distributed Cognition in Yorùbá Traditional Medicine.
Culture, medicine and psychiatry May 27, 2026 Obafemi Jegede
Global mental health initiatives often replace indigenous diagnostic categories like the Yorùbá term wèrè with neuropsychiatric frameworks, but this paper argues that such replacement constitutes epistemic violence. Based on twenty years of ethnographic research with traditional healers in southwestern Nigeria, the author shows that wèrè (meaning 'weave misery') diagnoses not individual brain dysfunction but a unraveling of interconnections across bodily, environmental, ancestral, and spiritual domains. Yorùbá language grammatically locates cognitive processes beyond the brain—fear in the chest, happiness in the stomach, focus in the liver—while recognizing environmental agents like rivers and trees as cognitive beings requiring ritual attention. Therapeutic protocols address ecological-cosmological fields where disequilibrium occurs. Global mental health must recognize ontological pluralism: multiple valid healing sciences operating in incommensurable realities.