In many cultures psychiatrists find themselves dealing with psychiatric symptoms that are almost universally attributed to black magic and evil spirits. In this article we discuss the case history of a man from the island of Curaçao who claimed that his symptoms were the results of the black magic that had been practiced on him (brua). Nevertheless it proved possible to treat the patient by combining a course of antipsychotic drugs with an alternative explanatory model that took into account the specific background conditions which the patient considered to be responsible for his symptoms.