Mental Health and Mental Illness in Non-Western Countries

Abstract

It is difficult to set mental health and ill-health (as understood today in the English-language literature and discourse) in a proper historical context worldwide because the language of mental health and illness has come about in a very limited part—primarily European—of a culturally diverse universe with its medical and psychological traditions being influenced very much by (western) psychiatry (see Chapters 2 and 3). In other words, the discourse in the field of mental health is articulated in the form of concepts mostly embedded in Euro-American psychiatry. The concepts around mind, illness and health in other cultures—those of the Majority World—that would approximate, or be similar to, ‘mental health’ and ‘mental illness’ (as understood in the language of psychiatry) are often very different (Chapter 2). As a result, it is not easy to fathom what exactly was going on in the past, nor indeed the present situation, vis-à-vis ‘mental health’ in non-western low- and middle-income countries (LMICs)/the Global South (see ‘Introduction’ for use of language), since, in these non-western cultures, what is seen as ‘mental health’ in Anglo-American English is often not articulated in the language of health and ill-health alone, but mostly in language applicable to social relationships, religion, ethics, philosophy/spirituality or just ordinary non-technical everyday terms.