Challenging the Movement for Global Mental Health: Do Nonwestern Countries Need More Biomedical Psychiatry?

    The Movement for Global Mental Health, a collection of psychiatrists and mental health researchers based around the world though mostly in western institutions, announced in a series of papers in The Lancet in 2007 a... [ view full abstract ]

    The Movement for Global Mental Health, a collection of psychiatrists and mental health researchers based around the world though mostly in western institutions, announced in a series of papers in The Lancet in 2007 a project to scale up biomedical psychiatric care in low-income, developing countries around the world. The movement, which has gained significant media attention for their efforts, promotes psychosocial interventions and greater use of psychopharmaceuticals in low-income and nonwestern countries to improve mental health. To date, the Movement for Global Mental Health has been less focused on exploring the potential utility and efficacy of local and/or indigenous methods of healing.
     Meanwhile, the WHO has consistently found, through four decades of epidemiological studies, that people in developing countries show higher rates of recovery from schizophrenia and related serious mental illness. For this and other reasons, some have critiqued the Movement for Global Mental Health claiming that their mandate is not supported by the evidence of psychiatric epidemiology and that their approach is not sufficiently attuned to local context. Contributors to this panel, who are researchers working on culture and mental health, will discuss problems that may accompany the scaling up of biomedical psychiatry around the world and examine the benefits of local healing systems, such as ritual healing and ayurvedic medicine. Many of the panelists focus on India, which has been a primary site for intervention by the Global Mental Health project—despite the fact that India showed the best outcome of all sites in the WHO studies of schizophrenia. In addition to pointing out concerns about the Global Mental Health project, panelists will ask what we can learn from places like India to improve mental health care in places that do not do as well in terms of recovery, such as the UK and the US.