Disability in the Global South

Abstract

The World Health Organization and the Movement for Global Mental Health are currently calling to ‘scale up’ mental health services, with particular emphasis on increasing access to psychiatric drugs within the global South (Lancet Global Mental Health Group 2007 ; Patel et al. 2011 ). Amid these calls, others can be heard, from local and global movements of psychiatrised peoples: people globally who have been psychiatrically diagnosed and often subjected to ‘treatments’, including institutionalisation and/or medical or surgical interventions, sometimes administered forcibly. The human rights abuses that occur within psychiatric institutions worldwide continue to be exposed (Mental Disability Rights International 2005 , 2010 ; Mindfreedom et al. 2011 ), and forced or coerced psychiatric treatment, both within institutions and within community settings, has been recognised as a form of torture and ill treatment (Minkowitz 2011 ).