"Towards a more nuanced #GlobalMentalHealth" by White and Sashidaran offers a critique on the #WHO published documents on the Mental Health Gap, and caution against relying too heavily on a Western biomedical model for mental health care in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMIC).
Here's a sneak peak from the article:
"Whilst we acknowledge the pressing need to support the mental health needs of people across the globe, this should not happen at the risk of causing harm. Research conducted by the WHO has indicated that outcomes for serious mental disorders are not superior in high-income countries (HIC) relative to LMIC (where populations may not have access to medication-based treatments). An examination of the academic discourse that followed the dissemination of the findings concluded that strenuous efforts were made to ‘preserve an image of Western superiority and Third World inferiority’. If the psychiatric services that are generally offered in HIC are failing to deliver, then great caution should be exercised in using these as a benchmark for scaling-up similar services in LMIC. It has been suggested that better outcomes for complex mental health difficulties in LMIC may be a consequence of the multiplicity of treatment/healing options available in LMIC compared to HIC"
Please give the whole article a read through. There is some great content in there.
https://www.academia.edu/6970293/White_R.G._and_Sashidharan_S.P._2014_._Towards_a_more_nuanced_Global_Mental_Health._British_Journal_of_Psychiatry_204_415-417
Here's a sneak peak from the article:
"Whilst we acknowledge the pressing need to support the mental health needs of people across the globe, this should not happen at the risk of causing harm. Research conducted by the WHO has indicated that outcomes for serious mental disorders are not superior in high-income countries (HIC) relative to LMIC (where populations may not have access to medication-based treatments). An examination of the academic discourse that followed the dissemination of the findings concluded that strenuous efforts were made to ‘preserve an image of Western superiority and Third World inferiority’. If the psychiatric services that are generally offered in HIC are failing to deliver, then great caution should be exercised in using these as a benchmark for scaling-up similar services in LMIC. It has been suggested that better outcomes for complex mental health difficulties in LMIC may be a consequence of the multiplicity of treatment/healing options available in LMIC compared to HIC"
Please give the whole article a read through. There is some great content in there.
https://www.academia.edu/6970293/White_R.G._and_Sashidharan_S.P._2014_._Towards_a_more_nuanced_Global_Mental_Health._British_Journal_of_Psychiatry_204_415-417
RSS Feed
