Speaker: Ursula Read (King's College London)

Abstract: This presentation draws on long-term ethnography in Ghana exploring the ways in which concepts of care, rights and community are enacted in response to severe mental illness and the influence of global mental health policy on situated practice.

The shift to community mental health care is widely advocated internationally as an efficient and humane alternative to institutional asylums. Over the last decade, there has been a visible expansion of community mental health care in Ghana with ambitious plans to bring treatment ‘to the doorstep’ of family homes and reduce reliance on traditional and faith healing centres.

Critics of global mental health fear that such ‘scaling up’ of mental health care may lead to increased medicalisation of distress, masking broader social and structural determinants and displacing ‘traditional’ or ‘spiritual’ epistemologies. The visibility of pharmaceuticals in mental health services in Ghana and the opposition of medical and spiritual treatment, however, may mask complex moral processes of relatedness, obligation and solidarity through which mental health workers and families imagine and enact care.

This situated relationality of these processes resists the formalisation and quantification which render them available for measurement, regulation and reproduction, troubling an instrumentalised approach to community mental health practice and the professionalisation of care.

Drawing on theories of solidarity and recent suggestions to extend concern with social capital to building social activism for mental health, I consider how this sociality of practice might inform ways of re-imagining community mental health as less a rationalised approach to service delivery than as a radical approach to fostering human solidarity across difference.

*If you are external to King's and would like to attend this event, please contact the event organiser directly.

Dr Ursula Read is a research associate at the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine. She has conducted extensive ethnographic research in Ghana focusing on experiences of severe mental illness and the impact on family life, the use of psychiatric services and traditional and faith healers, moral and ethical dilemmas around care and consent, and the intersection with rights-based approaches in global mental health.

She is currently working with Dr Hanna Kienzler on the Wellcome Trust collaborative project 'Mental Health and Justice' to explore meanings and experiences in Ghana of ‘the right to live independently and in the community’ as articulated in article 19 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

She is also co-Investigator of an Economic and Social Research Counci (lESRC)/Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) project using visual ethnography to explore collaborations between mental health workers and traditional and faith healers.