Decolonising mental health |
“Inequality is a key obstacle to mental health globally. Many risk factors for poor mental health are closely associated with inequalities in the conditions of daily life. Many risk factors are also linked to the corrosive impact of seeing life as something unfair.” — Dainius Pras, UN’s special rapporteur on mental health.
IN Pakistan, rising concerns around depression, anxiety, substance use and suicide — particularly among young people — has drawn attention to mental health. International frameworks, especially those promoted through the global mental health movement, have helped bring visibility to this neglected area. Yet as we develop mental health services, it is worth pausing to ask a deeper question: are we addressing the roots of distress, or merely managing its symptoms?
The book Decolonising Global Mental Health: The Psychiatrisation of the Majority World by China Mills,former researcher at the University of Oxford, extorts us to reflect on this question. Mills does not argue against mental healthcare but challenges the assumption that Western psychiatric models — developed in very different sociopolitical and economic contexts can be uncritically applied across countries in the Global South. Her main concern is that distress which is shaped by social and economic injustice, inequality, violence and political oppression runs the risk of being reframed as individual pathology, a process she describes as “psychiatrisation”.
This critique is highly relevant for Pakistan where psychological distress is often inseparable from our lived realities of grinding poverty, unemployment, gender inequality, insecurity, displacement and climate vulnerability. A farmer in Sindh facing........