Culture & Mental Health in a Global Perspective

All around the world, mental health and wellbeing have emerged as important welfare and policy concerns. As promoted through organisations of international governance, much of this concern is expressed in the language of biomedicalized mental illness, with an emphasis on psychiatric knowledge, evidence-based modelling, and the use of psychopharmaceuticals to treat psychological distress. Culture & Mental Health in a Global Perspective contextualises and particularises this approach to psychological distress so as to interrogate the politics, ethics, and epistemologies that it promotes. In so doing, we bring other approaches to psychological distress from around the world and individuals’ and communities’ experiences of psychic instability to the fore, all the while examining where tensions, frictions, and overlapping commitments are found. We consider the diversity of personal and cultural understandings of what constitutes ‘mental health’ and ‘mental illness’ and strive to understand the complex social, cultural, economic, and political dynamics that shape experiences of and approaches to psychological distress.

Culture & Mental Health in a Global Perspective is a course that Jess developed with Lotte Buch Segal and taught in Spring 2021. It is a graduate seminar and a required course for Edinburgh’s MSc in Global Mental Health.