WHO's MIND, whose future? Mental health projects as colonial logics

Abstract

This paper examines the Mental Health Improvements for Nations Development of the World Health Organization (WHO), or what it refers to as its MIND project, as it produces versions of human and human suffering. Arising at approximately the same time as decolonization began to occur, the WHO can be read as reflective of colonial history as well as a colonizing force in postcolonial times. Through an analysis of the WHO's publicly available material, we shall show how the MIND project is not only a product of, but also helps to produce the power of coloniality. In the WHO MIND project, professional disability knowledge is used to identify an emergent mental health crisis in need of Western medical intervention. Guided by Fanon's call to notice how assistance makes a subject ‘thoroughly fit into a social environment of the colonial type,’ we examine the role of disability knowledge in the production of people ‘fit’ to survive in environments that reproduce coloniality. We show how the WHO MIND project can be read so as to reveal the restrictive and exclusive versions of the human that have arisen from the colonial past as our way to attempt to disrupt the developmental trajectory of the coloniality of the present.

Keywords:

• interpretation
• World Health Organization
• mental health and illness
• postcolonial theory

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for inviting us to attend to our understanding of the colonial. Thanks also to Rod Michalko for discussion and editorial assistance.

Notes

1. This paper builds on Titchkosky and Aubrecht's (2009) analysis of World Health Organization texts in Kempf's (Ed.) Breaching the colonial contract: Anti-colonialism in the US and Canada.

2. While some scholars make a clear distinction in moments of history where a country is, or is not, governed or owned by another country, we treat the colonial as systems of power foundational to and enabling both capitalism and contemporary ways of knowing and governing. For this conception of the colonial, we thank Katherine McKittrick (2006), Rinaldo Walcott (2009), Gayatri Gopinath (2005) and others who take seriously Césaire's (2010, p. 127) words that the ‘colonial situation’, colonialism, the semicolonial, and the paracolonial situation is the ‘odd conditioning’ of all cultures everywhere. This work shows that everything bears the marks of enslavement including ‘normalcy’ (see, e.g., Erevelles, 2011; Meekosha, 2011; Sherry, 2007; Wynter, 2003).

3. The IHR represents the WHO's efforts to enforce compliance with its regime of global health security. Andrew Lakoff (2010) suggests that a global health security perspective rests on the assumption that establishing surveillance and early warning systems in developing countries is necessary to protect global health.

4. See Emma Stone (1999) for a discussion of the distinction between minority and majority world in relation to questions of development.

5. For more on this see the entire issue of Sephis E-magazine, volume 6, issue 3 (Roy, 2010).