- Title
- Mental Health in Asia and the Pacific: Historical and Cultural Perspectives
- Creator
- Roberts-Pedersen, Elizabeth
- Relation
- ARC.DE160100623 http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DE160100623
- Relation
- The Journal of Pacific History Vol. 54, Issue 1, p. 142-144
- Relation
- https://doi.org/10.1080/00223344.2018.1546539
- Publisher
- Taylor & Francis
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- This wide-ranging collection advances a comprehensive overview of national approaches to the care of the mentally ill in the Asia–Pacific region as well as the complex histories undergirding these measures. At the heart of such an endeavour is the epistemological problem of what constitutes ‘mental health’ in a global context and the degree to which mental illness can be understood in universal, biomedical or cultural terms. The notion of ‘global mental health’ can provoke vigorous scepticism, with critics arguing that Western diagnostic paradigms and humanitarian aid dollars have manufactured a false aetiological and therapeutic consensus that discounts local knowledge and practices, and constitutes a new iteration of an older tradition of racialized colonial psychiatry. Editors Harry Minas and Milton Lewis have been careful to acknowledge this contested ground; one of their purposes is to ‘help capture the full complexity of mental health and its determinants in the early twenty-first century’ by incorporating the insights of ‘re-socializing disciplines’ in the humanities and social sciences (p. 14). Attentiveness to these complexities is evident in each of the 19 chapters of Mental Health in Asia and the Pacific. Taken together, they reinforce the specificity of national situations and constraints at the same time as charting the effects of broader political and therapeutic developments in the region and globally.
- Subject
- mental health; Asia; Pacific; history; book review
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1506917
- Identifier
- uon:55936
- Identifier
- ISSN:0022-3344
- Language
- eng
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