“WHO’s MIND, Whose Future? Mental Health Projects as Colonial Logics,” (original) (raw)
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A Postcolonial Critique of Mental Health: Empire and Psychiatric Expansionism
Routledge International Handbook of Race, Ethnicity, and Culture in Mental Health, 2021
With growing calls from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Movement for Global Mental Health (MGMH) to ‘scale up’ Western mental health provision to meet a supposed ‘treatment gap’ in the Global South (Patel et al. 2007; World Health Organization 2010), this chapter offers a timely postcolonial critique of the historical imposition of such medical practices and discourse. Utilising postcolonial theory in the area of mental health allows us to appreciate that the contemporary arguments of such professional institutions for the expansion of their enterprise are far from new. Instead, the claims forwarded that there is an ‘epidemic’ of mental illness in the Global South (Patel et al. 2007; World Health Organization 2010), that Western psychiatry has a ‘moral imperative’ to act (Patel et al. 2006), and that—despite recognition of ‘cultural bound’ variations in symptoms—mental illness is a universal phenomenon with well-established biological markers (Patel et al. 2007; World Health Organization 2010) can all be found in the ideas of nineteenth century colonial psychiatry.
Psychiatry on a Shoestring: West Africa and the Global Movements of Deinstitutionalization
Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2022
The rise of psychiatric deinstitutionalization policies in the formerly colonized world is commonly narrated as a novel and decolonial intervention imparted by Euro-American NGOs of the global mental health era of the past two decades. By contrast, this article uncovers the history of a British imperial push for deinstitutionalization that originated in West Africa in the 1930s—decades prior to the rise of global mental health policies. Colonial austerity measures, combined with British officials’ observations of West African ethno-psychiatric healing practices, motivated an empire-wide policy favoring family and community care over institutional treatment for most mentally distressed colonial subjects. Global mental health policies that ideologically sanction state austerity measures for the mentally ill through community care are neither new nor decolonial. They remake colonial-era mandates for public services to operate on shoestring budgets.
Canadian Journal of Community Mental Health (Revue …, 2004
Ce travail ethnographique institutionnel s'appuie sur l'expérience de la première auteure en tant qu'intervenante en développement international, éducatrice et infir mière en santé mentale communautaire en Afrique occidentale, pour illustrer comment la recherche of cielle et les politiques portant sur les services de santé mentale re ètent la domination occidentale sur le plan académique, corporatif, économique et culturel. S'appuyant sur une analyse textuelle critique d'un questionnaire utilisé dans le cadre de demandes de subvention adressées à des agences d'aide internationale et de prêts, les auteures démontrent comment les processus of ciels privilégient les politiques et les approches de recherche occidentales et supplantent les perspectives locales. Pour être ef caces dans leur travail de développement en Afrique, les in rmières, les chercheurs et les décisionnaires doivent apprendre à reconnaître les attitudes de domination subtiles inhérentes aux approches occidentales. Les auteurs proposent que la recherche internationale et les politiques de développement international mettent en priorité la compréhension des connaissances locales plutôt qu'une approche privilégiant des cadres d'interprétation complexes et généraux.
The Anguish of Power: Remapping Mental Diversity with an Anticolonial Compass
An analysis informed by anticolonial principles “challenges the normalizing gaze of the dominant in the construction of what constitutes valid knowledge and experience.” (Kempf, 2009). This chapter aims to participate in this challenge by exposing how, at the level of embodiment, colonization has worked to oppress diversity and to make the possibility of valued bodily, sensorial, and mental differences all but disappear. By embodiment we mean the kinds of social and political relations that are established with bodies, minds, and senses. In particular, this chapter explores “mental health” discourse as produced and distributed by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Symptom, seduction, subversion: Reading resistance to psychiatry through a post-colonial lens
CUSP: Critical Cultures and Cultural Critiques in Psychology
Pills hidden under tongues, inside socks, flushed down toilets. Pretending to ‘ feel better’ , pretending to comply. How can we begin to trace the secrets, concealment and resistance that haunt psychiatry? How might we read this alongside the concealments of the colonised, enslaved, and oppressed – the ‘ laziness’ , formulaic deference, wilful submissiveness, playing dumb, and playing dead ( Scott, 1990) . If colonialism is historically and arguably currently entwined with psychiatry, then how might resistance to colonialism provide a lens through which to read resistance to psychiatry? This paper draws upon postcolonial theory, at the edges, in the spaces in-between, to engage with how strategies of resistance to colonialism may be read alongside and used to illuminate resistance to psychiatry. Resistance that is secret, sly, covered up. Resistance that is cryptic, opaque and veiled. Stitched together in a fragmentary bricolage, the paper seeks to move between postcolonial and critical psychological theorizations to read the stories of pretending ( to take medication, to feel better) that run like a thread through many people’ s stories of surviving the psychiatric system. Depending on the lens through which we look, such pretending may be ambivalent, seductive, a ‘ symptom of oppression’ , or subversive. Taking this further, this paper wonders what this might mean for more wide scale resistance to psychiatry and the pills it prescribes as they travel across borders into the countries, minds and bodies of the global South.
Bulgarian Ethnology, 2023
The main purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of decolonization of mental health from the study of the beginning of this process during the Cold War. To do so, we have as a topic of discussion the emergence of global and local projects in transcultural psychiatry. As main documentary analysis, we selected the final report of the World Health Organization transcultural project that was conducted between 1965 and 1973 in the Global South and Global North, entitled International Pilot Study of Schizophrenia (WHO, IPSS 1973). Our goal is to identify, through the analysis of this global cross-cultural project of the WHO, how mental health and culture were managed as a medico-political project aiming to create a common language for psychiatry through a Universalist epistemology. The WHO was connected to the social concerns of the post-war period by seeking in the epistemology of universality a reason to affirm that we are all equal and avoid future conflicts between nations. World peace, world citizenship, and universalism were important medico-political agendas of the IPSS and especially of the WHO. The “decolonial” aspect would be in the fact that everyone would have the same psychic structure and, therefore, would be on the same level. Even though the universality of schizophrenia played an important role as a critique of colonial psychiatry, the IPSS took a very risky and limited path. The problem is that we are not all the same. There is a subjectivity at stake, diversity, and sometimes very different cultural and social aspects to be taken into consideration. In this sense, the attempt to create a common and universal language for schizophrenia raised questions for some postcolonial and transcultural approaches.
Psychiatry and Empire, ed. Megan Vaugahn and Sloan Malone, Cambridge UP, 2001
This essay seeks out continuities and discontinuities in the transition from colonial to post-colonial psychiatry. It seems important, if somewhat obvious, to point out that in the transition from colonial to post-colonial both Senegal and France were transformed. To be sure, Senegal's independence figured more weightily in Senegal than in France, but then Senegal was only one many colonies that France lost in those years, so it is not an exaggeration to speak of parallel if not identical transformations. Colonial psychiatry transformed into a diverse range of practices, ranging from collaborations with traditional healing to biomedical, pharmaceutical-based psychiatry. Transcultural psychiatry occupies a mid-range in this spectrum; committed wholly neither to Western nor to Senegalese culture, it reaches out, seeking to bridge differences in beliefs and practices related to spirit, psyche, healing and wellness. Transcultural psychiatry here is distinguished from 'ethnopsychiatry', understood as the project launched by Georges Devereux of recuperating entire healing systems from non-Western cultures. 1 Transcultural psychiatry is a practice which involves and interests Senegal and France (as well, to be sure, as other countries). Its emergence demonstrates how, in the psychiatric arena during the transition to post-colonialism, neither Senegal nor France emerged as less caught up in an inter-connecting set of relations. The web of science and scientific institutions continued to link them directly (notably via the University of Dakar and other French-sponsored research organizations) and to link each (in different ways) into public and private international institutions (most notably the World Health Organization (WHO), yet 197
Throwing Pebbles While Waiting: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Mental Health and Colonialism
The Qualitative Report, 2021
In this article, three scholars jointly investigate questions of Western colonization and mental health. While their areas of interest and experience vary, the authors discuss oppression as a common thread connecting their ideas about mental health and its medicalization. In line with Toyosaki et al. (2009), the researchers did a community autoethnography, performing written dialogue as a dynamic research method. Using a sequential model, Kelly Limes Taylor wrote about her experience, passed it on to Rita Sørly and Bengt Karlsson. Karlsson added his story to the previous writing, and he passed it on to Sørly for further addition of stories. Sørly passed the stories added to Limes Taylor, which added new reflections. Together, the three researchers explore various questions: Who determines what is normal or humane in our society, and who gets left out of those decisions? Do mental health providers make a positive difference, or are they merely legalizing new forms of oppression? What...
The words 'colonised' and 'colonising' have recently been adopted in global North fields such as disability studies, highlighting notions of colonised bodies by colonising practices, with the implication that some or other 'decolonisation' is required. But these words remain little more than abstract and dehistoricised metaphors in these Eurocentric academic projects. This paper critically maps out some arguments as to why the colonial encounter is not simply a metaphor and cannot be bypassed in any global disability analysis. The paper argues how this historical event transcends the discursive, a violent materiality framing disability as a historical narrative and human condition, while (re)positioning disability as a useful optic through which to examine the dynamics of imperialism. The colonial provides the landscape for understanding contemporary Southern spaces within which disability is constructed and livedneocolonised spaces hosting what I call neocolonised bodies. The paper concludes that decolonisation, just like colonialism, is not a metaphor. Instead, it is a continuous violent and political process owned by the global South but open to collaboration, drawing on forms of resistance that have long colonial lineages.