This paper draws from research in disability and trauma studies to analyze Palestinian and Israeli experiences of mental illness and treatment from the 1950s until the present day. The source base is interdisciplinary, and relies on evidence from oral history, film, historical fiction, ethnographies, memoirs, journalistic non-fiction, and newspapers. The main argument is connected to that in my current book project: while biomedical explanations of health and wellness threaten to promote the replication of a standard and ideal body at the expense of atypical ones, supernatural understandings of jinn or demonic possession as an explanation for abnormal or brutally violent behavior (especially in situations of intense conflict between people or communities) threaten to absolve humans of accountability, or to remove human action from the political and cultural conditions which shape human agency. The tension between natural and supernatural understandings of disease etiology is paralleled by the tension between competing historical narratives of authenticity and legitimacy: who has the right to label a body as non-normative and to control the way that body is treated, and what is at stake in recognizing alternative sources of legitimacy – in labeling, in treating, and in narrating that experience? Israeli films such as Hanna Azoulay Hasfari’s Sh’chur and Mamdooh Afdileh’s Jean waJnoon and Rosine Nimeh-Mailloux’s historical fiction The Madwoman of Bethlehem, Amos Oz’s memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness, Ari Shavit’s journalistic non-fiction My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, and academic studies by Rakefet Zalashik, Celia Rothenberg, Gershon Shafir, Meira Weiss, Susan Sered, Rosemary Sayigh, Alean Al-Krenawi, Raja Shehadeh, and Rita Giacaman among others, all reveal a deeply scarred past and present as well as some efforts to build culturally meaningful complementary systems of care that incorporate religious as well as biomedical concepts sensitive to the gender, class, religious practice, and ethnic background of the people seeking support. In blending medical, social, and cultural history approaches with anthropological and literary methods, this paper suggests that the history of Palestinian and Israeli societies is inseparable from questions of what is ideal and who has the privilege to narrate in such contested spaces of interaction with the “othered” body.