Paper short abstract:

Any dialogue between global mental health and psychiatric anthropology will stall as long as "culture" is defined without psychopharmaceuticals

Paper long abstract:

Global Mental Health (as a set of public health interventions supported by the World Health Organization) and psychiatric anthropology (as ethnographies of psychiatric practices) seem to converge on the foundational role of "culture." Both would maintain that mental health needs to be assessed in culture-sensitive ways. They both assume that culture provides patients with an interpretive framework that shapes the experiences of mental distress as much as the expression of distress. They both agree that culture provides different thresholds of tolerance, and that what is pathological in one cultural setting could be seen as normal in another. At times, they even agree that biopsychiatric interventions are not necessarily the best treatments available, and that being embedded in a traditional cultural way of being can be positive for mental health. However, as I will argue here, this convergence works only as long as a truncated notion of "culture" is used. The moment that, for example, material artefacts are made part of the culture concept, the convergence seems to break down. The anthropology of psychopharmaceuticals, which has emerged over the past decade, seems to be especially troubling for classic culturalist approaches in both GMH and psychiatric anthropology. In this paper, I will show why the inclusion--or exclusion--of psychopharmaceuticals into approaches to psychiatry as practice is the key test for any proper dialogue between GMH and psychiatric anthropology.