Supporting Global Mental Health: Critical Community Psychology As a Potential Panacea?

Inverting the deficit model in global mental health: An examination of strengths and assets of community mental health care in Ghana, India, Occupied Palestinian territories, and South Africa

“…Collaboratively, the teams defined cross-cutting key parameters of interest, including socio-political, economic and historical factors impacting on infrastructures and lived experiences. To facilitate mapping and reflection, each country ‘team’ summarised specific assets, formal and informal care, resources and challenges against the backdrop of the historical and socio-political economy using Burgess and colleague’s socio-political wheel [ Fig 1 ] which is underpinned by an interest in the intersectionality of varied social locations and experiences [ 5 ]. The model is designed to illuminate how social processes and factors that permeate wider societies, intersect to determine the presence or absence of social and structural determinants of poor health [ 52 , 53 ].…”

“…The deficit framing is also seen where communities are instrumentalised, ignoring the active and dynamic role they can play in shaping processes and outcomes for mental health [ 3 , 4 ]. Furthermore, an interest in local scale-up to date has not fully engaged with the wider socio-political landscapes within which everyday life is negotiated for people living with mental illness and their families [ 5 ].…”

“…This approach, which typically holds high-income countries in the global north as the gold standard, can perpetuate harmful hierarchies and make assumptions [ 7 ] Instead, we highlight assets for community mental health within different complex local realities, and seek to advance scholarship and policy through a strengths-based approach to re-imagining community mental health care. Rather than seeing ‘community mental health’ as a rational, cost-effective ‘system’ of formalised ‘services’, we make visible community mental health as emergent within situated social practices and relationships [ 5 ]. To examine community mental health practices in Ghana, India, the Occupied Palestinian Territory [oPt] and South Africa, we draw on the experiential knowledge of community mental health practitioners, advocates and researchers living, working and conducting long-term relational research in these locations.…”

“…By focusing on a system’s inadequacies, the deficit framing of Global Mental Health [GMH] overlooks the influence of local socio-political and cultural contexts or fails to create space for interventions that build on community strengths and assets [ 5 ]. Many critical scholars have called for nuanced approaches that attend to structural, cultural and social factors influencing mental health conditions, care and recovery and that engage with lived experiences within the specific contexts of local communities [ 12 , 43 – 47 ].…”

Reconstructing theory in mental health and psychosocial support and peacebuilding: Towards an integrated model for psychosocial peacebuilding

“…Embedded in these methods is a belief praxis on the inseparability of knowledge and action: action builds on knowledge, and knowledge is created through action (Orford, 2008, p. xiv). Critical psychology views knowledge, particularly in the case of the biomedical model, as unable to escape the historical, social, and cultural values of the context in which it was created (Burgess, 2012).…”