Global mental health and its discontents

An inquiry into the making of global and local scale

Dados Bibliográficos

ID15085960
AutoresDoerte Bemme (McGill University), Nicole A D’souza (0000-0002-9151-3738, McGill University)
Ano2014
Volume51
Fascículo6
Páginas850-874
Data de publicação2014-12-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoTranscultural Psychiatry (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1363-4615 • E-ISSN: 1461-7471
EditoraSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/1363461514539830
PMID24981580
OpenAlexW2043877416
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas53
Referências citadas82

Global Mental Health’s (GMH) proposition to “scale up” evidence-based mental health care worldwide has sparked a heated debate among transcultural psychiatrists, anthropologists, and GMH proponents; a debate characterized by the polarization of “global” and “local” approaches to the treatment of mental health problems. This article highlights the institutional infrastructures and underlying conceptual assumptions that are invested in the production of the “global” and the “local” as distinct, and seemingly incommensurable, scales. It traces how the conception of mental health as a “global” problem became possible through the emergence of Global Health, the population health metric DALY, and the rise of evidence-based medicine. GMH also advanced a moral argument to act globally emphasizing the notion of humanity grounded in a shared biology and the universality of human rights. However, despite the frequent criticism of GMH promoting the “bio”-medical model, we argue that novel logics have emerged which may be more important for establishing global applicability than arguments made in the name of “nature”: the procedural standardization of evidence and the simplification of psychiatric expertise. Critical scholars, on the other hand, argue against GMH in the name of the “local”; a trope that underlines specificity, alterity, and resistance against global claims. These critics draw on the notions of “culture,” “colonialism,” the “social,” and “community” to argue that mental health knowledge is locally contingent. Yet, paying attention to the divergent ways in which both sides conceptualize the “social” and “community” may point to productive spaces for an analysis of GMH beyond the “global/local” divide

Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Global health · Global mental health · Health care · Mental health · Political science · Psychiatry · Social science · Sociology · Cultural Competency in Health Care · Law · Medicine · Mental Health Treatment and Access · Migration, Health and Trauma