Despite Watters’ bleak conclusions, there has been some pushback to these forces. The nascent global mental health movement, led by such luminaries as Dr. Vikram Patel, aims to do for mental health what HIV/AIDS activists did for sufferers of that affliction through advocating for local, low cost solutions to addressing depression and anxiety. Global mental health integrates cross-cultural psychology, public health, and human rights, and is based on the promise that mental disorders have underlying universal neurological structures but their symptoms and explanations vary in important ways across cultures. Patel argues that the way to ensure that symptoms and explanatory models are not bulldozered by globalization – and more importantly that effective indigenous models of treatment are not dismantled – is to relocate mental health research and care to local communities.
The job of Western mental health professionals can thus be seen as a sort of technology transfer of the tools of research and service development to local health systems. Patel has shown that this is feasible using community health workers in Goa, India, and his model has been taken up around the world. http://www.stats.org/stories/2010/americanizing_global_mind_3_15_10.html
