Paper short abstract:

Mental health is increasingly being made to 'count' globally, evident in its inclusion in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This paper explores the quantification of mental health and its interplay with development, focusing on the kinds of people that the numbers describe and create.

Paper long abstract:

Mental health is currently in a process of transformation from being described as an 'invisible problem' in international development to being framed as one of the most pressing development issues of our time. The concern that mental health is both absent within international development agendas and an obstacle to the achievement of development goals lies at the heart of the recent inclusion of mental health in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Three intersecting axes have been key to the inclusion of mental health in the SDGs: the conceptualization and calculation of the contribution of mental disorder to global burden of disease; the quantification of mental disorder as an economic burden; and the relationship between mental distress and poverty. This paper focuses on the data used to make mental health count (e.g. calculation of prevalence rates and burden) to explore the ways that techniques of quantifying mental health constitute that which they measure, and to trace the kinds of people that the numbers describe and make possible. The inclusion of mental health within development marks an important historic moment to foster a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between mental health and development and of how these two fields at times work together in producing reductionist, economistic, individualized and psychologized responses to poverty.