A mile apart in South London, Papa Williams' store-front surgery in Brixton Market and the Institute of Psychiatry in Camberwell have very different ways of treating mental illness.
Williams, a 'spiritual doctor', offers his patients a form of voodoo. Down the road, the continuing conundrum of why a much higher proportion of Africans and Caribbeans are diagnosed as schizophrenic compared with whites - and why they seek help from the realm of spells and spirits - has led to a new initiative by the IOP.
Based at the Maudsley Hospital, researchers have been given £115,000 by the Department of Health to investigate the way ethnic groups regard mental illness, and how this affects the type of treatment they seek. Dr Rosemary Mallett, medical sociologist at the Institute, says it's part of a wider study of the aetiology of mental illness.
'We asked what people felt caused mental illness. We found that Africans and Afro-Caribbeans cited much the same biological and social factors - stress, financial and emotional - as whites.' However the survey showed distrust of prescription drugs, many respondents seeing them as a racist way of controlling disturbed members of ethnic communities. Instead they favoured a holistic approach, a traditional part of African and Caribbean cultures. Turn to the advertisement pages of the weekly black newspapers, and you'll find a flourishing branch of complementary medicine, well beyond the fringe of alternative therapies that a sympathetic GP is familiar with.
Many practitioners are African marabouts; a few are Latin American voodoo doctors; Papa Williams is a houngan - a traditional healer from Haiti. He's fortysomething with a Zapata moustache and a pleasant manner. His shop strikes you first as a spiritual emporium, with statues of saints and stacks of incense. But the labels on the bath essences, even on the room-fresheners, claim to banish not only odours but evil spirits.
When Williams deals with mental problems he doesn't use terms like schizophrenia or psychosis but goes by the symptoms presented, working on the basis that someone who is mentally disturbed might well be possessed by a bad spirit.
He explains: 'People can do evil to you. A lot of evil is caused by people putting a hex on you. Mentally disturbed people, most of the time, it's a hex on them. I'm the last hope for them. Patients come here when doctors can't really help.' Williams says that he can put hexes on people as well as remove them; that he has the power to make an adulterer impotent. He can even, as he politely puts it, 'displace' people - that is, cause death - but only if the spirits he consults sanction it. If they do, he is merely the conduit; he's not personally responsible for what happens.
Mallett doesn't think that voodoo, Rastafarianism, herbal healing or any such regime can be made available through the much-burdened NHS. But, she says, the service must understand what treatments some people want, so there will be at least some interaction between the practitioners.
