Mental health and complementary and alternative medicine

![CDATA[For millennia, traditional medicine systems have used a variety of natural products and therapeutic arts to treat mental disorders. Many traditional systems of medicine treated mental disorders in an energetic or spiritual model, and often sufferers were viewed as being affected by a spiritual force (especially in cases of psychosis). The modern field of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and psychiatry has evolved significantly from its folkloric roots, and its present use is prevalent among sufferers of mental disorders (Wu et al., 2007; Sarris et al., 2010b). This chapter gives an overview of the current state of evidence for CAM in the mental health field and explores the present paradigm in mental health care, which appears to be undergoing a shift from a reductive, symptom-focused and pharmacotherapy-dominated approach to a more integrated, biopsychosocial model. The chapter concludes with a discussion of emerging areas of CAM research and clinical application in mental health. Only minor emphasis is placed on a review of clinical evidence, as this has been extensively covered in many other publications. Here we focus on exploring the future of CAM practice within mental health care.]]