Globalising Mental Illness

In May 2018, a report announced that diagnoses of depression are rising dramatically in the US (BlueCross BlueShield 2018). Between 2013 and 2016, rates increased by 63 per cent among adolescents and 47 per cent among millennials. The highest rates were found in the richest states of the Pacific Northwest and New England. The rise of mental disorders is said to be a global phenomenon, striking rich and poor countries alike. In October 2018, a report by The Lancet Commission on Global Mental Health and Sustainable Development (Patel et al. 2018) announced that low and middle income countries needed to take “urgent action” to “fully implement” psychiatric diagnostics and therapies developed in the US and Europe – as if these interventions had lowered rates of suffering in the countries they came from. The global “scaling up” of interventions seems to scale up the suffering as well. This is the one of the key paradoxes of mental health in the world today.

“Global Mental Health” (GMH) is an interdisciplinary field of research, policy, and advocacy that seeks equal access to basic mental health care for everyone in the world. My own discipline, medical anthropology, has been part of GMH from early on. The anthropologists were among the most globally oriented co-constituents of GMH. Yet anthropologists engaging with GMH also struggle with a range of value conflicts, especially when it comes to psychiatrists saying their diagnostics are universal and their therapies effective irrespective of cultural context.