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 …
Tag Archives: Mental health
Structural Competency: Framing a New Conversation on Institutional Inequalities and Sickness
The conference on structural competency organized and hosted by Jonathan Metzl and Helena Hansen, and held at the NYU’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis on March 23rd 2012, proved to be enormously successful. The conference was an experiment on the part of Hansen and Metzl to generate a new conversation among doctors, clinicians, urban planners, social theorists …
Communities and Global Mental Health: A Special Section of Transcultural Psychiatry
As described in a recent Somatosphere post, there has been much debate among cultural psychiatrists and social scientists over the movement for “global mental health.” The latest issue of Transcultural Psychiatry helps to advance this discussion with a special section on “Communities and Global Mental Health.” As guest editors Catherine Campbell and Rochelle Burgess explain, the papers in this …
Agency, biogenetic discourse and psychiatric disorder
In recent years, a growing (and pleasingly interdisciplinary) literature has developed around the intersecting themes of neurogenetic ‘explanatory’ narratives, largely pharmaceutically-driven processes of medicalization, stigma and socioclinical identity in the context of psychiatric disorder. In this post I aim to briefly review two of the most immediate and provocative of these publications, and then launch a more free-ranging reflection on …
Global Mental Health and its Discontents
The field of Global Mental Health (GMH) is an emerging formation of knowledge and practice seeking to address mental illness on a global scale. A growing body of research has established mental illness as one of the most pressing “burdens of disease” (Lancet series, 2007). Recently, an article in Nature entitled “Grand Challenges in Global Mental Health…
Psychiatric Neuroscience, Stigma, and the Aging Brain: Dispatch from the Annual Meeting of One Mind for Research
Cross-posted from The FPR Blog.
A few weeks ago I attended the first annual meeting of the One Mind for Research Campaign: Curing Brain Disease. (The group’s new CEO is Ret. General Peter Chiarelli, the commanding officer of the 1st Cavalry Division during the Iraq War, and you could practically taste the battle dust in your mouth at the …