Abstract
Recent criticism of the Movement for Global Mental Health may be contextualized within postdevelopmentalist opposition to universal, stage-by-stage progress on the Western model. Partly because of postdevelopmental thinking, theories of indigenous inferiority and exoticism have gradually ceded to more sophisticated, dynamic and affirmative models of non-Western culture. But a false opposition may be promulgated, in which the only alternative to psychiatric neocolonialism is a cultural preservationist defence of local systems of distress and healing. Moreover, even the seemingly respectful concept of a cultural “idiom of distress” may be understood from a non-Western perspective as a mode of power that aims to (re)produce psychologized Western subjectivity. Both the Movement for Global Mental Health, and its critics, must articulate a positive model of the encounter between Western expertise, including biomedicine, and the variegated ethnopsychiatries and popular systems distributed across the globe.
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Miller, G. (2017). Reflecting on the Medicalization of Distress. 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_5
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