A Local Critique of Global Mental Health

Mills, China; Davar, Bhargavi V.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-42488-0_28

Cited by 21 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Critics have expressed concerns about pharmaceutical industry involvement and that the WHO and MGMH could foster a biomedical "imperialism" that overwhelms salutary indigenous cultures of mental health (Summerfield, 2012, pp. 525, 528;Cosgrove et al, 2020;Mills & Fernando, 2014). Yet prevention-focused goals of promoting mental health are also prominent in WHO (2013a) and MGMH materials (e.g., Patel et al, 2007), which affirm a non-reductionist and multifactorial understanding of mental health that substantially aligns with, and arguably complements, predominant views in the mindfulness literature.…”

Section: What Is Public Health?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Mindfulness for Global Public Health: Critical Analysis and Agenda

Oman

2023

Mindfulness

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Objective The modern mindfulness movement and the public health field are aligned in many approaches, including recognizing psychosocial stress impacts and physical-mental health linkages, valuing “upstream” preventive approaches, and seeking to integrate health promotion activities across multiple social sectors. Yet mindfulness is conspicuously absent from most global and public health literature and practice, suggesting unfulfilled potential. This paper analyzes the mindfulness field from a public health perspective, with the aim of identifying evidential and conceptual bases, methods, potential consequences, and initial research and action agendas for greater integration of mindfulness approaches into global, national, and local public health efforts. Methods This paper reviews scientific and scholarly literature on the currently existing and potential relationships between mindfulness and public health, with special attention to 14 dimensions of potential tension or alignment. Results Several alignments were noted above. However, the mindfulness field is substantially lagging on multi-level interventions (e.g., both individual and collective levels), cultural and religious adaptations, and epidemiologic underpinnings. Both mindfulness and public health initiatives are in need of efforts to promote intercultural, interreligious, and intercontemplative competencies, in developing interventions to address pathogenic factors in the collective attentional environments in society, and in attending to religious and spiritual factors. Conclusions Full public health uptake will benefit from several additional lines of research and innovation, especially greater attention to cultural and religious adaptation, with attention also much needed to multi-level interventions and epidemiologic foundations.

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Section: What Is Public Health?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Mindfulness for Global Public Health: Critical Analysis and Agenda

Oman

2023

Mindfulness

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“…As is well known, the early GMH agenda was met with fierce critique by social scientists, transcultural psychiatrists and anthropologists who questioned the cross-cultural validity of psychiatric knowledge, the deficit model of the ‘treatment gap’, the epistemic politics of evidence-based medicine, the absence of the social determinants of mental health from the GMH agenda, and the colonial power dynamics perpetuated by GMH (Fernando, 2014; Kirmayer & Pedersen, 2014; Mills & Fernando, 2014; Summerfield, 2013; White et al, 2017). Critics brought to bear knowledge of culture, context and community, and the epistemological stances of critique and constructivism on the positivist, interventionist and moral propositions of GMH.…”

Section: Revisiting the Early Gmh Agenda And Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

Contingent universality: The epistemic politics of global mental health

Bemme

2023

Transcult Psychiatry

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The field of global mental health (GMH) has undergone profound changes over the past decade. Outgrowing its earlier agenda it has performed a reflexive turn, broadened towards a social paradigm and developed new modes of knowledge production, all of which reshaped ‘mental health’ as a global object of knowledge and care, and the epistemic politics of the field. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among GMH experts and recent agenda-setting publications, I discuss how GMH advocates and critical observers alike have created conceptual and practical middle-grounds between different forms of mental health knowledge – across culture, epistemic power, lived experience, policy platforms and academic disciplines – framing their dynamic encounters as dialogue, adaptation, participation, co-production or integration. Ultimately, I argue, GMH today is focusing less on establishing mental health as a universal problem than on managing its inherent multiplicity through alignment and integration across different bodies of knowledge. Global knowledge, so conceived, is fluid and malleable and produced in open-ended knowledge practices, governed by what I call ‘contingent universality’. It is not new that the concepts and practices of the psy-disciplines are malleable and multiple, internally and externally contested, rapidly changing over time and not easily transferrable across space. What is new is that within the increasingly heterogenous epistemic space of GMH, these features have become assets rather than liabilities. GMH knowledge achieves both global reach and local relevance precisely because ‘mental health’ can be many things; it can be expressed in a wide range of idioms and concepts, and its problems and solutions align easily with others, at many scales. These fluid and integrative knowledge practices call for renewed empirical, critical and collaborative engagement.

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“…In a detailed series of articles, Sera Davidow has documented the conflicts of interest deeply embedded within the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), which calls itself the "largest grassroots mental health organization" in the United States (NAMI n.d.;Davidow 2014;. Speaking from India, Bhargavi Davar has also noted the presence of pharmaceutical interests in the push toward global mental health, which is likely to lead to a much larger market for pharmaceutical products (Mills and Davar 2016;Davar 2014).…”

Section: Evidence For Standpoint Theory In the Psy Sciencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Mary Ellen Copeland created the Wellness Recovery Action Plan, which helps individuals identify their early warning signs, what things look like when they are breaking down, and a crisis plan, so that they can dictate what happens to them if they are in need of support (Advocates for Human Potential n.d.; Cook et al 2011). In Pune, India, survivor Bhargavi Davar has established the Bapu Trust, which runs the Seher program, a form of local support that aims to create conversations about well-being with those in low-income communities (Mills and Davar 2016), as well as Sanchit, an oral history archive of individuals diagnosed with mental illnesses and collection of resources related to survivor experiences (Davar 2015).…”

Section: Developing Novel Tools and Theoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Standpoint Theory and the Psy Sciences: Can Marginalization and Critical Engagement Lead to an Epistemic Advantage?

Friesen

Goldstein²

2022

Hypatia

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As participatory research practices are increasingly taken up in health research, claims related to experiential authority and expertise are frequently made. Here, in an exploration of what grounds such claims, we consider how feminist standpoint theory might apply to the psy sciences (psychiatry, psychology, psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, and so on). Standpoint theory claims that experiences of marginalization and critical engagement can lead to a standpoint that offers an epistemic advantage within a domain of knowledge. We examine experiences of marginalization and critical engagement in the mental health system, as well as evidence for epistemic advantages resulting from these experiences. This evidence, found in the identification of problematic assumptions and the development of new tools and theories in the field, grounds our argument that standpoint theory is indeed relevant to the psy sciences and that many of those who have experienced marginalization and have engaged critically have an epistemic advantage when it comes to knowledge-production. The implications of this argument are significant: those who have attained a standpoint within the psy sciences ought to be included in research and given both tools and funding to develop research programs. However, we must be wary of the risks of tokenization, cooptation, and essentialization that are likely to accompany such a transformation.

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A Local Critique of Global Mental Health

Cited by 21 publications

References 16 publications

Mindfulness for Global Public Health: Critical Analysis and Agenda

Mindfulness for Global Public Health: Critical Analysis and Agenda

Contingent universality: The epistemic politics of global mental health

Standpoint Theory and the Psy Sciences: Can Marginalization and Critical Engagement Lead to an Epistemic Advantage?

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