The Movement for Global Mental Health: Critical Views from South and Southeast Asia

In The Movement for Global Mental Health: Critical Views from South and Southeast Asia, prominent anthropologists, public health physicians, and psychiatrists respond sympathetically but critically to the Movement for Global Mental Health (MGMH). They question some of its fundamental assumptions: the idea that mental disorders can clearly be identified; that they are primarily of biological origin; that the world is currently facing an epidemic of them; that the most appropriate treatments for them normally involve psycho-pharmaceutical drugs; and that local or indigenous therapies are of little interest or importance for treating them. The contributors argue that, on the contrary, defining mental disorders is difficult and culturally variable; that social and biographical factors are often important causes of them; that the epidemic of mental disorders may be an effect of new ways of measuring them; and that the countries of South and Southeast Asia have abundant, though non-psychiatric, resources for dealing with them. In short, they advocate a thoroughgoing mental health pluralism.1. Introduction: Global Mental Health: Critical Views from South Asia and Beyond - William Sax and Claudia Lang, Critical Histories, 2. Mental Ills for All: Genealogies of Global Mental Health - Stefan Ecks, 3. Schizoid Balinese? Anthropology’s Double-Bind: Radical Alterity and Its Consequences for Schizophrenia - Annette Hornbacher, 4. Misdiagnosis: Global Mental Health, Social Determinants of Health and Beyond - Anindya Das and Mohan Rao, The Limits of Global Mental Health, 5. Jinns and the Proletarian Mumin Subject: Exploring the Limits of Global Mental Health in Bangladesh - Projit Bihari Mukharji, 6. Psychedelic Therapy: Diplomatic Re-compositions of Life/Non-life, and the Living and the Dead - Harish Naraindas, Alternatives, 7. The House of Love and the Mental Hospital: Zones of Care and Recovery in South India - Murphy Halliburton, 8. Ayurvedic Psychiatry and the Moral Physiology of Depression in Kerala - Claudia Lang, 9. Global Mental Therapy - William Sax, Afterwords, 10. Afterword - Johannes Quack, 11. ’Treatment’ and Why We Need Alternatives: An Autoethnographic Reflection on Psychiatric Incarceration in India Anonymous, Index.1. The contributors are leading figures from a variety of disciplines 2. The essays take a sympathetic but critical view of MGMH 3. The book takes a particular geographical point of view: from South and Southeast Asia.

Claudia Lang ============ Claudia Lang is currently an associate professor (Heisenberg) of anthropology at University of Leipzig, Germany. Before, she was a postdoc at the ERC project ＂GLOBHELATH: From international public health to global health＂ in Paris, France. She works on the anthropology of health in India and has published on different topics, including traditional medicine, mental health, psychiatry, religion and ritual, health governance and subjectivities. She is currently working on the digitalisation and proliferation of mental health and global psy in India’s megacities; and on memories, traces and genealogies of primary health care in Kerala. Her most recent publications include the book Depression in Kerala. Ayurveda and mental health care in India’s 21st century (2018) and a co-edited special issue of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry ＂Genealogies and Anthropologies of Global Mental Health＂ (2019). William Sax =========== William S. (’Bo’) Sax studied at Banaras Hindu University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Washington (Seattle), and the University of Chicago, where he earned his PhD in Anthropology in 1987. From 1987 to 1989 he was lecturer in Anthropology at Harvard University, and post-doctoral fellow in the Harvard Academy. After that he taught Hinduism in the Department of Philosophy and Religious studies at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, for eleven years. In 2000 he took up the Chair of Anthropology at the South Asia Institute in Heidelberg. He has published extensively on pilgrimage, gender, theater, aesthetics, ritual healing and medical anthropology.