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"This book offers a critical post-colonial reading of the newly emerging arena of global mental health; with particular focus on psychology's and psychiatry's encounters with, and responses to, distress or 'mental illness' in low-income countries. The World Health Organisation and the Movement for Global Mental Health currently push for the 'scale-up' of psychiatric and psychological interventions onto low-income countries, modelled on those from high-income countries (such as the UK). However critiques of psychiatric and psychological services from service users, the survivor movement and professionals from many high-income countries, often remain invisible within 'Global Mental Health' literature. This book argues that it is imperative to explore how this alternative 'evidence base' might be mobilised to fruitfully interrogate calls to 'scale-up' psychiatric and psychological services in low-income countries. The book seeks to de-familiarise current 'Western' conceptions of psychology and psychiatry using post-colonial theory, and seeks to bring into focus a series of questions and problematisations. As such it is ideal reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as researchers in the fields of critical psychology and psychiatry, social and health psychology, cultural studies, public health and social work"--
List of contents
Introduction De-familiarising GMH: a methodology of Encounters 1. Making Mental Health a Reality for All 2. 'Harvesting Despair' -Suicide Notes to the State and Psychotropics in the post 3. Educating, Marketing, Mongering 4. The Turn / The Look: Interpellating the Mad Colonial Subject 5. 'Necessary evils': When torture is treatment and violence is normal 6. Sly Normality: Between Quiescence and Revolt 7. Decolonising Global Mental Health
