Genealogies and Anthropologies of Global Mental Health

Lovell, Anne M.; Read, Ursula M.; Lang, Claudia

doi:10.1007/s11013-019-09660-7

Cited by 40 publications

(27 citation statements)

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“…But in this special issue, we are also concerned with questions about the scope, diversity, and contentiousness of claims regarding mental life that are not reducible solely to specific assemblages such as global mental health (Lovell et al. 2019), the globalization of American psychiatry, or transnational pharmaceuticalization (Ecks 2017). As these assemblages travel, transfigure, and settle in different settings, they interact with much broader systems of governance, inclusion/exclusion, identity making, and citizenship (Lovell 2013).…”

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confidence: 99%

The Global Psyche: Experiments in the Ethics and Politics of Mental Life

Béhague

MacLeish

2020

Med Anthropol Q

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Across hemispheres, nations, and domains of social life, the language of psychiatry and mental health constitutes an increasingly universal frame for suffering while also expressing a human condition ever more liberated from and ever more alienated by medical knowledge. The use of psychiatric labels and discourses as tools of governance in the face of violence and disorder and as means of grievance and redress for social and political movements are not particularly new. But the present moment presents a particular density, ubiquity, and fluidity to both of these deployments. The affective dimensions of large-scale political projects, from humanitarianism to environmentalism, electoral processes to ever-expanding (self-) surveillance practices, rest on objectifying interior states and generating master narratives of collective stress (Masco 2017). Psychiatric symptoms and diagnostic categories become sites of threat, governance, care, resistance, mobilization, and knowledge creation in domains ranging from health care access, borders and immigration, police violence, nuclear conflict, and control and funding of scientific research to white nationalism, post-industrial precariousness, neoliberal managerialism, hate crime, and liberal apocalypticism. In the process, conceptions of mental life become sites of moral and political reckoning and ethical speculation and reconfiguration, birthing novel experiments in justice, rights, survival, personhood, and the good life.The aim of this collection is to examine diverse incarnations of what might be called the global psyche. We combine these two over-general terms advisedly, with an eye to the multitudinous labors by which worldwide aspirations are produced or disavowed, an attention to the limits and possibilities of conceiving the psyche and the globe as stable points of reference, and an awareness of the novel forcespolitical, technological, neurobiological, ecological-that outpace and disrupt abiding interpretive frames. As anthropologists of the experience, objectification, regulation, and problematization of psychic life, we are committed to conversations-like those under the ambit of global mental health-about how practice and policy can best be calibrated to harmful forms of psychological distress confronting some

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confidence: 99%

The Global Psyche: Experiments in the Ethics and Politics of Mental Life

Béhague

MacLeish

2020

Med Anthropol Q

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“…The second special issue in 2016 offered further counterpoint to the public health oriented GMH approach through ethnographic accounts highlighting the cultural specificity of mental health in context (Ecks, 2016; Jain & Orr, 2016). Efforts to harness social science insights to critique and refine GMH practice have led to important edited volumes (Kohrt & Mendenhall, 2015; White, Jain, Orr, & Read, 2017) and a thematic issue of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry (Lovell, Read & Lang, 2019) that takes the field itself as its empirical object, and analyses the history of its institutions (Henckes, 2019; Lovell, et al., 2019), its interventions as they unfold (Bemme, 2019; Kienzler, 2019; Read, 2019), and the sometimes paradoxical effects of public mental health surveillance (Béhague, 2019; Lang, 2019).…”

Section: Moving Beyond a Polarized Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The most significant reformulation of the notion of “mental health” in GMH has been its re-framing in terms of international development. This process, again, has a longer history told elsewhere (Bemme & D’souza, 2014; Brown, Cueto, & Fee, 2006; Lovell et al., 2019) but it culminated in the inclusion of “mental health and well-being” in the United Nations SDGs after extensive lobbying from the GMH community in the UK (Thornicroft & Patel, 2014; Votruba & Thornicroft, 2016) and by applied psychology NGOs at the UN in New York (Balvin, 2015). A stakeholder conference adjacent to the World Bank Spring meeting in 2016 called “Out of the Shadows: Making Mental Health a Development Priority” further solidified the mental health and development nexus.…”

Section: Mental Health and Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Global Mental Health: Interdisciplinary challenges for a field in motion

Bemme

Kirmayer

2020

Transcult Psychiatry

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In recent years, efforts in Global Mental Health (GMH) have evolved alongside critical engagement with the field's claims and interventions. GMH has shifted its agenda and epistemological underpinnings, increased its evidence base, and joined other global policy platforms such as the Sustainable Development Goals. This editorial introduction to a thematic issue traces the recent shifts in the GMH agenda and discusses the changing construct of ''mental health'' as GMH moves away from a categorical biomedical model toward dimensional and transdiagnostic approaches and embraces digital technologies. We highlight persistent and emerging lines of inquiry and advocate for meaningful interdisciplinary engagement. Taken together, the articles in this special issue of Transcultural Psychiatry provide a snapshot of current interdisciplinary work in GMH that considers the socio-cultural and historical dimensions of mental health important and proposes reflexive development of interventions and implementation strategies.

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“…Yet this psyche moves through unstable, dynamic, and provisory combinations/recombinations of its components: international agencies, institutions, private and public funders, civil society organizations, but also of knowledge, technologies, principles, and practices (Lovell et al. ). Global psyche here denotes the standardized, very much (but not only) bio‐medically oriented labels of mental health, incorporated in psychiatric classification systems, namely the public International Classification of Diseases (ICD) behavioral health chapters and the private, American Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals (DSMs), themselves forever evolving and somewhat unstable, historically produced normative descriptors of human experience and its outer limits.…”

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confidence: 99%