Mental Health and World Citizenship

Critical Social Policy, 1989

History of Psychiatry, 2015

This paper examines the relationship between ‘world citizenship’ and the new psychiatric research paradigm established by the World Health Organization in the early post-World War II period. Endorsing the humanitarian ideological concept of ‘world citizenship’, health professionals called for global rehabilitation initiatives to address the devastation after the war. The charm of world citizenship had not only provided theoretical grounds of international collaborative research into the psychopathology of psychiatric diseases, but also gave birth to the international psychiatric epidemiologic studies conducted by the World Health Organization. Themes explored in this paper include the global awareness of mental rehabilitation, the application of public health methods in psychiatry to improve mental health globally, the attempt by the WHO to conduct large-scale, cross-cultural studies relevant to mental health and the initial problems it faced.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2017

2008

2009

A systematic review of the literature on health promotion as conveyed by the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion yielded two major findings: health promotion and recovery in mental health have many values and features in common, and health promotion and recovery in mental health do not refer very much to one another. A global model of public mental health is

International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 2011

2011

This is the first in a series of four papers examining mental health and the global agenda. The series as a whole addresses three broad themes. First, there are significant opportunities to be gained through public policies that promote mental health and prevent mental disorders to the greatest extent possible. Better mental health contributes to the promotion of healthy development and achievement of educational, social and economic goals, as well as the avoidance of both communicable and noncommunicable health problems and the consequent premature mortality. Second, there are also potential significant social and economic gains to be made through public policies that recognise and address the burden of mental disorders. Third, public policies need to prepare for the fact that in many countries mental disorders are likely to rise through a range of different factors including population growth and ageing, marital and family breakdown, an increasing number of orphans and child-heade...

I argue that the right to mental health should be viewed as a universal human right and that the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), as an international standard, protects it because it places a positive duty on states to actively promote the mental well-being of its citizens for the purpose of preserving their dignity and allowing them to flourish. I begin by discussing the discrimination that persons with psychiatric disabilities experience, including the systemic barriers and lack of mental health resources which impact the quality of their lives. Because flourishing and dignity are interconnected, protecting the rights of persons with mental illnesses is important because the possession of good mental health provides a firm basis for securing other basic human rights. Consequently, I maintain that the main advantage of a human rights approach for securing the right to mental health is that human rights is the only source of law which is accepted without qualification. I then look at three objections against the CRPD and the idea of the universal right to mental health as a socio-economic entitlement. Finally, I demonstrate how the CRPD can overcome these criticisms and offer suggestions on how states can implement the CRPD into their domestic mental health legislation.

2010

Bulgarian Ethnology, 2023

The main purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of decolonization of mental health from the study of the beginning of this process during the Cold War. To do so, we have as a topic of discussion the emergence of global and local projects in transcultural psychiatry. As main documentary analysis, we selected the final report of the World Health Organization transcultural project that was conducted between 1965 and 1973 in the Global South and Global North, entitled International Pilot Study of Schizophrenia (WHO, IPSS 1973). Our goal is to identify, through the analysis of this global cross-cultural project of the WHO, how mental health and culture were managed as a medico-political project aiming to create a common language for psychiatry through a Universalist epistemology. The WHO was connected to the social concerns of the post-war period by seeking in the epistemology of universality a reason to affirm that we are all equal and avoid future conflicts between nations. World peace, world citizenship, and universalism were important medico-political agendas of the IPSS and especially of the WHO. The “decolonial” aspect would be in the fact that everyone would have the same psychic structure and, therefore, would be on the same level. Even though the universality of schizophrenia played an important role as a critique of colonial psychiatry, the IPSS took a very risky and limited path. The problem is that we are not all the same. There is a subjectivity at stake, diversity, and sometimes very different cultural and social aspects to be taken into consideration. In this sense, the attempt to create a common and universal language for schizophrenia raised questions for some postcolonial and transcultural approaches.