In the last ten years, several players in World Health have turned to the knowledge and forms of care practiced in the societies of the Global South with renewed interest and new reading grids. This is particularly the case for the movements of consumers, survivors and (ex-) users of psychiatry (CSX Movements) and even certain actors in Global Mental Health. This interest aims to neutralize the effects of the pathologization and medicalization of life, processes initially observed in Western societies, but which have now also extended to societies in the Global South. Furthermore, this view takes into account the relatively consensual evidence that the prognosis of serious conditions such as schizophrenia is more favorable in some societies that preserve ancestral forms and rituals of medicine than in societies where psychiatry has a monopoly on the treatment of "mental illnesses". However, this concept is not recent, the Senegalese experience of the Fann school being, in the 1960s, a pioneer in the dissemination of ancestral knowledge in the management of what western psychiatry calls "mental illness".
Forming a multidisciplinary and cosmopolitan team, the French psychiatrist Henri Collomb started a process that indicated the transition from the co-presence of knowledges to a new configuration of knowledges and practices that, simultaneously, recognized and respected the differences between knowledges and found forms of dialogue between them, in a first attempt to establish what today we call the ecology of knowledges. Specifically, this experience involved processes of epistemic and cultural translation between Senegalese ancestral knowledges and psychiatry, psychoanalysis and anthropology, in the space of a reformed psychiatric institution. This collective and visionary effort benefited from a collaboration with the local population, a gesture that was also forerunner of the
contemporary ethical and care requirements. But it would also reveal some limits, in particular for concentrating its activities in the hospital space.
Starting from the history of the School of Fann, this communication aims to analyze its heritage and question its current situation in contemporary Senegal. Subsequently, we defend the possibility of a transtemporal translation of Fann's experience, rescuing and recontextualizing some of its elements, now taking into account what we can learn from its achievements and limitations. Finally, we briefly analyze the potential of this reconfiguration and update of Fann's experience to deal with the problems currently thematized in the Senegalese biomedical field, as well as to highlight its value in the horizon of a “Santé Monde” where new perspectives of eco-health, capable of going beyond the reductionist paradigm of “mental health”, are needed.
