Smoked or bewitched? the relationship between cannabis use and mental illness among the shona persons in Zimbabwe

Abstract

The metanarrative of biomedicine and “psy” discipline (psychology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry etc.) asserts that cannabis use is one of the fundamental causes of mental illness among different men in the Rushinga district of Zimbabwe. These metanarratives, however, appear to have universalised, medicalised and marginalised the conception and representation of mental illness as enmeshed in local epistemologies and ontologies of mental illness. Based on local epistemologies, elders in Diwa largely trace mental illness to discursive sociocultural explanations rarely linked to cannabis use. This paper answers the central question: How is the use of cannabis by different persons related to mental illness in the Rushinga district? I argue that community members, health providers and police officers want to think of persons, especially men, with mental illness as “mad” and immoral cannabis users who brought illnesses upon themselves and lack personal responsibility based on Western neoliberal and biomedical metanarratives. However, this framing is not helpful, it is detrimental to treatment and social reputation, as it bypasses local cultural explanations that may be protective and that offer clearer guidelines for treatment. © The Author(s) 2025.