ABSTRACT
The emergence of the field of Global Mental Health (GMH) in the last ten years has had a significant influence on the orientation and development of discourses around mental health in the Global South. GMH can be conceptualised as a set of initiatives that promote the evidence-based ‘scale up’ of mental health services in the Global South, to improve human rights of people with mental health difficulties and their access to care (Jain and Orr 2016). The field emerged in the context of growing epidemiological research on the global burden of disorders, including their economic burden in treatment costs and loss of economic output, and in the context of a series of international reports on mental health provision (Desjarlais et al. 1995; Lancet Global Mental Health Group 2007; World Health Organization 2001). A key moment was the launch of the 2007 Lancet Global Mental Health series (Patel 2012), which set out an agenda for action to address the ‘burden’ of mental disorders. Linked to this was the emergence of the Movement for Global Mental Health (MGMH), driven by key architects of the Lancet series and supported by key international mental health institutions such as the Institute of Psychiatry, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the World Health Organization (WHO). MGMH rests on two pillars: improving access to care by closing a perceived ‘treatment gap’ between the availability of services and the number of people needing such services, and addressing the human rights of people with mental disorders (Patel 2012). MGMH encompasses a coalition of mental health professionals, policy-makers and service users and carers, and now comprises 200 institutions and 10,000 individuals.
