Paper short abstract:

Some say that mental health is an obstacle to development goals because of the relationship between mental health and poverty. Here it is imagined that improving mental health will help to reduce poverty. However, this relationship may also be a sign of the psychiatrization of poverty.

Paper long abstract:

The concern that mental health is both absent within, and an obstacle to, development goals lies at the heart of current advocacy to mainstream mental health within the 2015 development agenda. This advocacy, driven by the Movement for Global Mental Health and the World Health Organization, hinges around the relationship between mental health and the economy, and specifically, the association between mental health and poverty.

While this relationship is often conceptualised as a vicious cycle, the focus tends to cluster in one direction - how improving mental health outcomes would improve economic outputs and reduce poverty. This means that the other half of the cycle - the mechanisms by which poverty eradication might improve mental health - remain under theorised. Hence social and economic transformation is imagined through individual transformation, thus allowing a discursive existence of social determinants of distress alongside largely individualised interventions. This paper will explore whether this, in part, can be understood as marking the psychiatrization of poverty - where the 'symptoms' of poverty are reconfigured (globally), by professionals and by the people who experience them, through psychological and psychiatric registers as 'symptoms' of mental disorders amenable to clinical, therapeutic and pharmaceutical intervention. Drawing upon fieldwork by the author in India, the tools and techniques of the global psychiatrization of poverty will be explored. Concern will be raised that this process may divert attention from; a) structural contributors to distress; b) the politics of psychiatric diagnosis; and c) the potentially detrimental effects of some development initiatives on (mental) wellbeing.