Black Lives and Black Minds Matter – It’s Time to End Racism in Mental Health

ELEANOR BREEN O’BYRNE Dear Sajid Javid, I am writing to you regarding the troubling and longstanding racial disparities which exist within mental healthcare. This is evidenced by the the fact that black people are four times more likely to be detained under the Mental Health Act than their white counterparts (NHS Digital, 2021).  Racial disparities…

A multi-perspective of global mental health: A summary and reflection on the seminar

Yifan Lu, MSc Medical Anthropology On October 15th  2019, a seminar on mental health and International Development took place at  the UCL Department of Anthropology. Five contributors to the newly published book, The Routledge Handbook of International Development, Mental Health and Wellbeing, gave talks on mental health, drawn from their research. This volume intends to…

Ethical Dilemmas from New Delhi to Dharamsala

An objective of my research sought to understand whether a concept of ‘mental health’ exists amongst the TCiE (in contrast to the Western definition of mental health that has been developed by UN/WHO). Interestingly, the UN definition appeared incomplete to respondents as it fails to address ethics.

Book Launch: Sadness, Depression and the Dark Night of the Soul: Transcending the Medicalisation of Sadness

I found that religion played a crucial role in the way sadness was understood and resolved: symptoms that otherwise might have been described as evidence of a depressive episode were often understood in those more religiously committed within the framework of the Dark Night of the Soul narrative, an active transformation of emotional distress into a process of self-reflection, attribution of religious meaning and spiritual growth.