Interrogating the Rights Discourse and Knowledge-Making Regimes of the “Movement for Global Mental Health”

Abstract

The explication of an evolving scale-up of research for global "mental health" and development, with which the lead author has been involved in as a program manager, nurse educator, and researcher for nearly 20 years, became a multilayered study to uncover a vast and complex social organization. This study grew as she assisted an international nongovernmental organization (NGO) called the Right to Livelihood in its efforts to gain research funds and to advance research interests in the growing "movement for global mental health". It was, however, the NGO's original research process-a participatory model of community consultation-that first captured our interest. Not unlike many organizations seeking to access research and program funding to harness credibility to expand programming at new sites, however, the Right to Livelihood needed more formal "evidence" of its "success." In this chapter we attend to how this "evidence" came to be organized and to the various kinds of "mental health and development" knowledge that were being coordinated across healthcare and development sectors in Canada and globally. By different "mental health and development knowledge" we are referring to the various ways mental health and development were understood by workers at the NGO. Here we describe the knowledge of a variety of individuals who all find themselves oriented quite differently to particular kinds of health rights work. Researchers or program managers with an international NGO, a project manager with an official international development research organization, and someone doing grassroots advocacy are all workers for "mental health rights" who interact with and produce diverse kinds of (and differently authorized) knowledge. In our analysis we show how development practices (e.g., the exploration of indicators for measurement) and the dominant movement for global mental health- and goals of a rapid "scaling up" of mental illness diagnosis, treatment, and research-began to enter the way workers at the NGO understood and performed their work. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)