Abstract
Maternal mental health is increasingly being seen as an important public health concern globally, and particularly within low- and middle-income countries, including South Africa. In this chapter, we describe two maternal mental health projects based in Cape Town: the Perinatal Mental Health Project (PMHP) and The Philani Plus (+) Intervention Program. We demonstrate how, in attempting to address the country’s gap in maternal mental health care, both projects draw upon global recommendations of task-shifting but intimately entangle such task-shifting with South African realities, lexicons and matrices. These projects thus synthesise global and local knowledge in relatively novel ways and, in turn, speak to some of the critical concerns that have been raised about Global Mental Health discourse. We also touch on some of the costs, benefits and possible transferability of these projects, and consider what insights they may offer for the further development of maternal mental health care in South Africa and potentially elsewhere.
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Notes
- 1.
Typically, these centres are variably staffed by psychiatric nurses with infrequent visits by psychiatrists and psychologists in training.
- 2.
These resources are available here: http://pmhp.za.org/learn/pmhp-resources
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Cooper, S., Honikman, S., Meintjes, I., Tomlinson, M. (2017). Synthesising Global and Local Knowledge for the Development of Maternal Mental Health Care: Two Cases from South Africa. 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_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39510-8_23
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