International Zone: Healers Of Aro

Duration: 12:00

Year Published: 1963

Creator: Produced by The United Nations and George Movshon

Complete Record: Healers Of Aro is an episode of the International Zone series. Describes an experiment of collaboration of traditional healers and methods of healing with techniques of western psychiatry in the Nigerian village of Aro, of the Yoruba tribe. A Yoruba village, about 60 miles from Lagos, has been recruited to accept as residents a significant number of psychiatric patients from the teaching hospital of the University of Ibadan. Accepting them as equal colleagues in the therapeutic process, Dr. Thomas Lambo works closely with the village headman and the village shaman/healer in an attempt to effect a cure. Each patient is accompanied by a member of his own family, but it differs from classical community-based healing, insofar as the the patients are not originally from the village.