BMJ  2008;336:992-994 (3 May), doi:10.1136/bmj.39513.441030.AD

Analysis

How scientifically valid is the knowledge base of global mental health?

¹ Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College, London SE5 8AF

Mental health is a construct that cannot be seen as independent of culture, society and situation. Derek Summerfield argues that Western definitions and solutions cannot be routinely applied to people in developing countries

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Global mental health now has its own academic units, literature, study, and training courses and the World Health Organization is a major articulator of this work. Last September, a series on global mental health in the Lancet asserted that mental disorders now represent a substantial "though largely hidden" proportion of the world’s overall disease burden, that every year up to 30% of the global population would develop some form of disorder, and that there was strong evidence for scaling up mental health services worldwide.^{1 2} In this article I examine the evidence for these claims and challenge the assumption that Western frameworks can generate a universally valid knowledge base.

Psychiatric research and practice rest on empiricist convention rather than on timeless discovery. The principal classification systems, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), are shaped by contemporary notions about what constitutes a . . . [Full text of this article]

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