Global Mental Health and Human Rights: Confronting 21st-Century Authoritarianism and Racial Supremacy

About

Amid the prevailing global instability, the immediate repercussions of warfare and political violence have echoed, sparking conflicts and precipitating substantial forced migration. This reality is starkly manifest across the globe, epitomized by the enduring conflict and extensive displacement observed in the war-ravaged region of Gaza. Furthermore, the conflict in Ukraine serves as another poignant manifestation of this tumult, highlighting the widespread prevalence of violence and displacement in modern society. Conflicts and wars have plunged the planet into a vortex of environmental, climate, societal, gender, and racial crises, undermining human rights and self-determination on a global scale. Mental health and human rights are dramatically interlocked constructs. There is no mental well-being without peace and equity and vice versa. Mental prosperity seems to be thought of as a consolidated right just for privileged groups; in contrast, oppressed and marginalized individuals most often resulted in being blamed for their incapability to handle their living conditions and adjust to challenges and adversities because of a lack of civilization, poor personal and social capital or inadequate relational skills.
More recently, critical global mental health and global public health have recognized the urgent need to analyze and intervene in the political determinants and antecedents of cogent global challenges of our contemporaneity including war and structural violence. In addition, transnational and intersectional feminist and postcolonial perspectives have exposed patriarchal whiteness as the dominant grammar informing the mainstream of psychology and psychiatry, unveiling the extractivist strategies of the so-called essentialist culture and performed gender-sensitive protocols. Indigenous and postcolonial participatory approaches propose themselves as a genuine alternative to conceptual and intervention models aiming at re-socializing and readapting people to iniquitous and unjust classist and racialized living conditions.
Our approach is to foster a psychology of liberation that will provide theoretical and practical participatory tools to enable the adaptation and control of indigenous and self-determined models to understand mental health in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) and societies undergoing or coming to terms with political turbulence, war, and social upheaval

Course leader

Guido Veronese, University of Milano-Bicocca Alex L. Pieterse, Boston College Ashraf Kagee, Stellenbosch University

Target group

Applications are welcome from PhD students, young researchers and practitioners working in mental health, international relations, law, gender and race studies, social work, education, psychology, psychiatry, environmental and climate studies, political science, public health, nursing, global health and mental health. The school is also open to activist individuals and groups, policy and decision-makers, NGOs and CBOs, stakeholders and influencers seeking to strengthen their knowledge and know-how on global mental health, human rights, and allied disciplines

Fee info