ABSTRACT
With growing calls from the World Health Organization and the Movement for Global Mental Health to ‘scale up’ Western mental health provision to meet a supposed ‘treatment gap’ in the Global South, this chapter offers a timely postcolonial critique of the historical imposition of such medical practices and discourse. The chapter begins by defining and explaining postcolonialism and the rare engagements with such theory in previous mental health literature. This is followed by a summary of the ‘official narrative’ of Western mental health interventions in colonial and ‘post-colonial’ societies which forwards the position that psychiatry’s social control function in colonial times was less than systematic, and that their work has ultimately had a positive impact on the local population. The claims from medical scholars that psychiatric interventions in the Global South are benevolent, moral, and serve no economic benefit to Western imperialism does not stand up to close scrutiny.
