Paper short abstract:

Current debates surrounding global mental health are noteworthy for what they neglect to take into account, i.e., the lived experience of mental illness, including psychopharmacology. I argue for an approach that can specify substantive domains of relevance in terms of “extraordinary conditions.”

Paper long abstract:

Mental health slogans are increasingly part of global health campaigns. Within the Global Mental Health Movement, "No health without mental health," serves as a battle cry for practitioners, researchers, and advocates. Rival camps take different tacks concerning that status of psychiatric knowledge and practices. I identify a curious concordance in the thinking of proponents of brain activity mapping, on the one hand, and critics of the global mental health movement, on the other. Current debates are particularly noteworthy for what they neglect to take into account, that is, the lived experience of persons afflicted by mental illness as well as their kin. This is of specific relevance in relation to psychopharmaceutical and psychosocial interventions. After sketching contemporary lines of thinking regarding global mental health, I suggest an anthropological approach in terms of what I am calling "extraordinary conditions." I argue that this approach can contribute to the goal of specifying substantive domains of knowledge and experience that are of critical relevance for the field of global mental health. In particular, these concern the ability to formulate the meaning of the extraordinary, the circumstances of precarity, and the ubiquity of struggle in the domains of experience and treatment of mental illness. I argue that this formulation is vital not only for the field of medical/psychiatric anthropology but is also indispensable for the nascent field global mental health.