Postcolonial Psychiatry and the Formation of Global Mental Health

• In Event: Travelling Knowledge (II): Health, Disease and Pharma

Abstract

In recent years the field of global mental health has received increasing attention from governments, NGOs and the public. Despite this rising interest, there are few attempts to analyse its historical formation. In this presentation I will unearth an important part of that history by examining the International Pilot Study of Schizophrenia (IPSS). Beginning in 1967, the IPSS was a long-term epidemiological project undertaken by the World Health Organization in nine “developed” and “developing” countries. It aimed both to ascertain the universality of this disorder and to trial the viability of collaborating with psychiatrists in developing countries. I argue that the IPSS was critical to the formation of global mental health because it was the first project to struggle with the political and epistemological implications of globalising psychiatry. Accommodating itself to a recently decolonised global landscape demanded that psychiatry resolve entrenched issues of nomenclature, classification and the universality of its categories of disorder. Responding to these challenges, psychiatrists drew upon the methodologies of epidemiology, in the process designing new instruments and practises which established our contemporary architecture of global mental health. Focusing on the practices and ideas of psychiatrists in India, Nigeria and Columbia, I demonstrate that physicians in postcolonial nations drew upon the tools of “western” science to answer different questions. These alternative concerns ultimately produced the concept of “expressed emotion” as a critical factor in the prognosis of schizophrenia. Unearthing the important contributions of psychiatrists in postcolonial nations to the emergence of global mental health, my presentation will seek to build bridges between postcolonial studies and literature in the history, philosophy and sociology of science.

Author

• David Robertson, Princeton University