Derek Summerfield: Critic of ‘Global Mental Health’

Derek Summerfield, a researcher and academic of London’s Institute of Psychiatry, is a fundamental critic of the idea of ‘global mental health’. Due to his deeply rooted criticism of the history of the westernization of the world at large, Summerfield believes the West’s infiltration across the globe is a toxic force, plaguing humans worldwide. His main opposition to the idea of global mental health is that we, as the West, have little understanding of mental health in our own countries let alone a good grasp of what others in different cultures, and therefore invariably different worlds, are struggling with on a psychosocial level. Before the West finishes grappling with its own understanding of mental health does it have any right deploying it on a larger, global sphere. Derek Summerfield believes the global epidemic of mental disorders is a false positive and a true detriment to human beings everywhere.


On July 7th 2012, Summerfield lectured on this very theme at the Advanced Study Institute in Montreal, Quebec. View the film here! He summarized his ideas and critiques in several main thoughts:

1. Argues there is no true definition of ‘mental disorder’ as the concept is a cluster of symptoms funneled into an idea by individuals of western thought.

2. Pharmaceutical companies have the potential for grand economic gains to export the idea of mental disorders and therefore motives need to be questioned.

3. The current approach to medicate mental health problems provides a solution that severs interpersonal connections and the formation of control over one’s life through community support; this is a disservice.

4. Humans are resilient yet the current model assumes vulnerability and the need for help and counseling. The entire mental health industry is built around this latter notion. “The average citizen of a society is as tough or weak as his or her society assumes them to be.“

5. The global mental health approach fails the fundamental test of validity. People of the West do not have a good understanding that captures the incredibly diverse peoples that grace the globe.

6. Whose knowledge counts? The literature negates the work of individual communities, shamans and traditional healers by framing the need to educate people of mental health and enhance mental health literacy. This approach is facilitated despite often, literacy rates are low and the concepts are not well understood by subjects.

7. Western mental health largely ignores anthropological methods, which is essential to capture the variance in time, memory, and actor as a social being.

8. Western mental health critiques the notion of mental health evidence in developing nations because it lacks “good evidence” though the West has a poor evidence base of its own.

Derek Summerfield’s stance on global mental health is controversial to many. He states that within the monopsychiatry model, people’s culture and situational factors are merely colorful garments and after those variances are striped away, a universal psychological human remains. Summerfield views this notion as an intellectual embarrassment and a profound breach of human rights.

I end this post with a quote that precedes an article written by Summerfield: He began to wonder if we could ever make a psychology so absolute a science that each little spring of life would be revealed to us. As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others. –Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey (1891).