Misdiagnosis: Global Mental Health, Social Determinants of Health and Beyond

Abstract

We critically engage with the Movement for Global Mental Health (MGMH) through the lens of the Social Determinants of Health (SDH), suitably widened. We explore the socio-political context of Indian community mental health initiatives in order to elaborate the opportunities/impediments for a public programme. We critique the MGMH for being preoccupied with the burden of mental illness and its “treatment”, while being inattentive to the social, economic, and political contexts shaping local/global ecologies of well-being/suffering. Hence the economic arguments of the MGMH fail to examine the realities of local contexts (poor public health funding and primary health care, lax pharmaceutical regulations, asymmetric power relations and indigenous knowledge systems). Using the concepts of globalisation and global health, and taking a population perspective, we describe a neo-materialistic version of SDH.