When Psychiatry Meets Mythology

Loshini Rajentharan explains why mythological vignettes help her reflect on her work with psychiatric patients.

Six years ago, working first as a house officer and then a medical officer in the psychiatric ward of a tertiary hospital in northern Malaysia, I had an encounter that never left me.

A young girl believed her parents were imposters. Because she posed a risk to both herself and her family, she had to be admitted as an inpatient to the psychiatric ward. Every day her parents would visit; every day she would refuse to see them. Every day, they would leave the ward in tears.

One day, after a couple of weeks of treatment with an oral antipsychotic, she finally looked at her mother and said, Ibu (‘Mother’ in Malay).

The tears her mother shed on that occasion, as her father quietly looked on, became imprinted on my mind. But the clarity she experienced did not prevail for long. The sadness, the sorrow, and the uncertainty all returned in time. I do not know what ultimately became of that family. Yet, I found myself returning to them in my mind recently while writing a short, reflective vignette between two mythological figures.

The vignette goes as follows:

When Thanatos Meets Yemoja

They meet by the shores of a vast ocean.

She asks him to sit.

To rest.

To set down his weariness for a while.

He asks about grief.

She says it is the human condition.

“Even after death?” he asks.

“Long after death too.”

He is silent for a while.

“But it is easier to grieve the dead,” she continues.      

“Why?”

“They have a fixed coordinate.”

She traces a finger through the wet sand.

“The hippocampus maps people, you know,” she says.

“They named it after the seahorses,” she adds, almost as an aside*.

“Grieving the living? That is much harder,” she muses.

The tide advances and retreats.

“The living keep wandering.”

He nods.

And closes his eyes.

*Arantius 1587, chap. 1; Tavares et al. 2015.

That conversation—part of a private series I wrote where Thanatos wanders the world meeting figures from various mythological traditions—prompted me to wonder about the role of mythology in medicine, especially in psychiatry.

Story as the starting-point

We often say psychiatry begins with a history. I have never quite believed that. Psychiatry, in my opinion, begins with a story. Even the word psychiatry itself derives from psyche—from the Greek psukhē, meaning ‘breath, life, or soul’. In classical mythology, Psyche was personified as the mortal woman who became the beloved of Eros (Oxford Reference n.d.; Apuleius 2008, 4.28–6.24). Before we make a diagnosis, before we consider whether a person fulfills criteria within the DSM or the ICD, we are entrusted with the narrative of another human being. It is one of the greatest privileges of our profession (Charon 2001).

The stories I have heard over the years have stayed with me for different reasons. Some became cautionary tales. Others quietly altered the way I thought about families, resilience, or loss. Some made me wonder how I myself might have behaved had life unfolded differently. Others never left me simply because the weight of tragedy suffused both the beginning and the ending.

Science has transformed psychiatry in extraordinary ways. We understand more about neuroanatomy, genetics, and psychopharmacology than ever before. Yet, I have increasingly come to think that science and mythology are not attempting to answer the same questions. Psychiatry asks what is happening within the mind and brain; mythology asks what it feels like to live through the experience. That, perhaps, is why these stories have survived for thousands of years. Long before diagnostic manuals existed, people were already searching for ways to understand grief, identity, betrayal, love, sacrifice, memory, and hope. Those questions have never disappeared; only our language for asking them has changed.

Conversations across cultures

The more I explored mythology, the more I found unexpected conversations taking place across cultures. The archetype of the trickster appears again and again: Loki in the Norse tradition, Hermes in Greek mythology, and Anansi within Akan folklore. Different landscapes, different civilizations, yet each reminds us that intelligence is not always solemn, and wisdom does not always arrive dressed in seriousness (Jung 1968, 255–72).

Likewise, water flows through many traditions—Yemoja, the Yoruba mother of rivers, and Ganga, revered within Hinduism. These similarities fascinate me, not because they suggest that every culture tells the exact same story, but because they reveal that human beings have always wrestled with remarkably similar questions.

None of these mythological figures diagnose illness. Nor should they. But they sometimes illuminate an experience in a way that clinical language cannot.

“The living keep wandering.” I have thought about that sentence often. Not because it explains bereavement—it does not, at least not entirely—but because it captures something I have witnessed repeatedly, both inside and outside the consulting room. The dead remain fixed within memory. The living continue to change. Relationships evolve. People leave; people return. Sometimes they do neither, and uncertainty itself becomes its own form of grief.

Perhaps that is why I ended up writing conversations between Thanatos and world mythologies. It was not because mythology competes with medicine, but because it has always been another language through which human beings try to understand themselves. Returning to stories has become the way my mind processes loss. I do not do this with the hope that these stories will offer certainty; psychiatry has taught me that certainty is often elusive. But stories have always offered me something else: company.

I still think about that young woman who finally said, Ibu. I wonder whether she remembers saying it. I wonder whether her mother still remembers hearing it, as I do.

Medicine taught me how to recognize Capgras syndrome (Capgras and Reboul-Lachaux 1923). Stories taught me why that single word, Ibu, offering a mother recognition through the miasma of psychosis, still matters.

I am reminded of something my father told me 16 years ago, in a fit of frustrated anger. I no longer remember what brought on the tirade, but his message was clear: I lived too much in a world of fantasies and stories, and I needed to get back to reality.

Now, as a practicing psychiatrist who has sat and endured the stories of others’ sufferings and sorrows day after day, I can confidently say that stories have never been an escape for me. They are what keep me anchored to reality. When life gets hard, they are what I turn to, to bring me back to myself. And there is nothing wrong with that

About the author

Loshini Rajentharan is a psychiatry registrar originally from Malaysia and currently practising in the UK. She writes to pay attention to the people, places, and moments that might otherwise be overlooked or forgotten. You can find her on LinkedIn: Loshini (Loshi Rajen) Rajentharan.

References

Apuleius. 2008. The Golden Ass. Translated by P. G. Walsh. Oxford University Press.

Arantius, Julius Caesar. 1587. De humano foetu liber tertio editus ac recognitus: Eiusdem anatomicarum observationum liber, ac de tumoribus secundum locos affectos liber, nunc primum editi. Apud Iacobum Brechtanum.

Capgras, Joseph and Jean Reboul-Lachaux. 1923. “L’illusion des ‘sosies’ dans un délire systématisé chronique.” Bulletin de la Société Clinique de Médecine Mentale 11: 6–16.

Charon, Rita. 2001. “Narrative Medicine: A Model for Empathy, Reflection, Profession, and Trust.” JAMA 286 (15): 1897–1902. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.286.15.1897.

Jung, C. G. 1968. “On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure.” Translated by R. F. C. Hull. In The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 9, pt. 1, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 2nd ed., edited by Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, and Gerhard Adler, 255–72. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400850969.255.

Oxford Reference. n.d. “Psyche.” Accessed July 29, 2026. https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100352533.

Tavares, Rita Morais, Avi Mendelsohn, Yael Grossman, et al. 2015. “A Map for Social Navigation in the Human Brain.” Neuron 87 (1): 231–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.