McGill University’s Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, which hosted a conference this summer on global mental health, has started a blog and posted several video interviews with participants from the conference.  These are excellent short summaries of particular issues or positions around global mental health, which could very readily be used in a teaching context.  In the interview embedded below, Vikram Patel, Senior Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, addresses the critique of global mental health as a Western export:

In another video posted on the site, Frederick Hickling and Hilary Robertson-Hickling, both at the University of the West Indies, and Jaswant Guzder of McGill University, discuss a cultural-therapy-based program aimed at school-aged children in Jamaica.

For those interested in a more extensive engagement with these issues, the Division’s Vimeo page now has complete videos of many of the talks from the conference.  Below I have embedded the two talks which perhaps represent the most diametrically opposed positions on global mental health: Vikram Patel’s “Why Mental Health Matters to Global Health” and Derek Summerfield’s “Against ‘Global Mental Health.’” Also available on the Vimeo site are:

• Joop de Jong, “The ‘Folie à Trois’ between Global Mental Health, Anthropology and Psychiatry“
• Suman Fernando, “Challenges for Mental Health Development in Low- and Middle-income Countries“
• Kwame McKenzie, “Global Mental Health: The Right Problem But the Wrong Solution?“
• Gilles Bibeau, “Halt to the Abuse of Globalization in the field of Mental Health“