Psychiatric Epidemiology and the Quest for Global Mental Health

16. Mai | 10:00

Dynamiken und Erfahrungen der Globalisierung

Despite impressive attempts to establish uniform methods for comparing patient populations across the globe, serious questions about the validity of psychiatric classifications and therapies across different cultural contexts remain. In what sense then can we talk about global mental health? By examining the World Health Organization studies of schizophrenia, important large-scale epidemiological studies which took place from the 1960s to the 1990s, I will explore the changing meanings of the global in the sciences of mental health. In trying to rethink the history of science for the anthropocene, historians have highlighted the importance of understanding the evolution of knowledge as a global process. But there are challenges to linking the different scales at which knowledge production takes place into a single coherent narrative. This challenge of thinking across global and local scales has been well thematized by scholars in cultural anthropology, as well as more recently by intellectual historians of climate and empire, who rightly point to the multiple competing temporalities within the global history of knowledge production. I argue that the history of science and medicine should attend both to the global nature of knowledge evolution, as well as to how the global is articulated in specific technical practices. New technical methods in medicine create certain scales of coordination across time and space, which in turn shape notions of the local and global. The standardization of psychiatric diagnostic methods has produced comparable data, but there has been a corresponding reduction of complexity in the type of data collected. The quest to identify mental disorders at a global scale often fails to link up with local clinical knowledge. In this talk I will examine the WHO studies of schizophrenia as a case study in what Anna Tsing has called the ‘politics of scale making’.

Vortrag von Alfred Freeborn (MPIWG)
Kommentar: Andreas Mayer (CMB)

Kontakt

Andreas Mayer
Andreas.mayer  ( at )  cnrs.fr

Ort