Abstract
This chapter offers an examination of a life course approach in global mental health (GMH) and identifies three central challenges to this approach. These include the ‘violence’ that may be done to culturally specific systems of meaning in introducing ‘mental health literacy’ in the form of Western psychiatric concepts, explanatory models and treatment modalities. A second challenge resides in issues of temporality and the way time is conceptualized within intervention and research programmes, including the superimposition of normative developmental trajectories that disrupt culturally meaningful understandings of life stages. A third challenge derives from application of life course approaches to migrant populations at a time of unprecedented human movement. Each of these challenges is examined, as are the implications for the development of GMH.
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Watters, C. (2017). Three Challenges to a Life Course Approach in Global Mental Health: Epistemic Violence, Temporality and Forced Migration. In: White, R., Jain, S., Orr, D., Read, U. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Sociocultural Perspectives on Global Mental Health. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39510-8_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39510-8_12
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