The movement for global mental health (MGMH) has raised awareness about the paucity of mental health services, particularly in low-and middle-income countries. In response, policies and programs have been developed by the World Health Organization and by the Lancet Commission on global mental health, among other organizations. These policy initiatives and programs, while recognizing the importance of being responsive to local needs and culture, are based on Western biomedical conceptualizations of emotional distress. In the paper, we discuss how a rights-based approach can promote the voice and participation of people with lived experience into the MGMH. We argue that a human rights framework can be enhanced by incorporating the conceptual approaches of critical inquiry and community mental health. We also discuss how rights-based approaches and service-user activism can productively reconfigure Western psychiatric conceptualizations of distress and provide both a moral and empirical justification for a paradigm shift within the MGMH.

The status-legitimacy hypothesis proposes that those who are most disadvantaged by unequal social systems are even more likely than members of more advantaged groups to provide ideological support for the very social system that is responsible for their disadvantages. Li, Yang, Wu, and Kou (2020, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin) sought to expand the generalizability of this hypothesis by testing it in China, addressing inconsistencies surrounding the empirical support for this hypothesis by postulating that the construct of status should be separated into an objective and subjective status marker. They reported that objective socioeconomic status (SES; income and education) negatively predicted system justification, while subjective SES positively predicted system justification. In the present study we attempt to replicate and extend the work of Li et al. in a cross-cultural comparison of demographic stratified quota online samples in China and the United States. We test the status-legitimacy hypothesis using objective and subjective SES to predict system justification using cross-sectional and cross-lagged regression analyses. We received partial support for Li et al.'s findings. Specifically, subjective SES positively predicted system justification for both societies during cross-sectional and cross-lagged longitudinal analyses. However, we failed to replicate Li et al.'s findings surrounding objective SES in China during cross-sectional and cross-lagged analyses.

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