Mental Health Worldwide: Culture, Globalization and Development

Mental Health Worldwide offers a perceptive critique of the universalized model of psychiatry and its apparent exportation from the West to the developing world. The foundational concepts of the dominant models in psychiatry, however, are understood very differently in non-western cultural traditions. Whilst there is a worldwide need to emphasize mental health in the context of public health, the ’traditional psychiatric’ model, with its focus on medicalization and drug-based ’cures’, may not always be appropriate, and its approaches should not be employed unquestioningly. Here, Suman Fernando takes a much-needed critical look at the field of psychiatry in an international context, proposing suggestions for advancing mental health and wellbeing in low and middle income countries in a way that is ethical, sustainable and culturally sensitive. These lessons can also be applied to developing service provision in the West in our increasingly globalized world.

Suman Fernando is Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at London Metropolitan University, UK. Before that he was Senior Lecturer at the European Centre for Migration and Social Care at the University of Kent, UK, and consultant psychiatrist in the National Health Service for over twenty years. He is active in non-governmental organizations in UK and abroad, as well as being consultant to capacity development programmes in Sri Lanka. He has written and lectured widely on mental health development. In 2011 he was given the Lifetime Achievement Award for Culture, Race and Mental Health by the University of Toronto, Canada.