Global Mental Health and Decolonization

This seminar will examine how the universality of mental health has been constructed and negotiated, within the World Health Organisation and in the Movement for Global Mental Health. The speakers will consider how Global Mental Health stories its own history - frequently overlooking that psychiatric classification has long been global, especially in its quest for international comparison of 'mental illness'; and how it engages with critiques of its coloniality - often by framing colonialism as racist denial of care located in the past, rather than something that wraps around the present.

Dr Harry Yi-Jui Wu is Associate Professor, Cross College Elite Program, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan. His book, Mad by the Millions: Mental Disorders and the Early Years of the World Health Organization has recently been published by MIT Press.

Dr China Mills is Senior Lecturer in Public Health at City, University of London. She is the Principal Investigator on a British Academy grant exploring the social life of global mental health technologies, and author of Decolonizing Global Mental Health The Psychiatrization of the Majority World.

This seminar is hosted by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Mental Health at Birkbeck, University of London and is supported by the 'Connecting Three Worlds' Wellcome Collaborative Award.