Anne M. Lovell and Gerald M. Oppenheimer, Reimagining Psychiatric Epidemiology in a Global Frame: Toward a Social and Conceptual History

Abstract

This book is a must-read for health professionals and historians who are interested in exploring the origins of current research including the legacies of colonialism. It presents a novel perspective on the way in which psychiatric epidemiology emerged. Until now, the narrative about its origin has been almost entirely based on the directions taken in ‘western’ countries. What the book reveals is the multiple other directions in which the field evolved, sometimes in parallel and equally compelling ways, in other countries, focusing primarily on the Global South. This work has been largely obscured or overshadowed in the prevailing narrative. Much of it has not been published in mainstream journals, is still unavailable in English translation or simply has not been taken as seriously as it should be due to an often inadvertent prejudice towards work from the Global South. For example, the chapter on Brazil illuminates how a distinctive psychiatric epidemiology developed within the Collective Health movement which fought for political change and health equity, was purposefully grounded in the social ecology of Brazil and rejected the tenets of ‘modern epidemiology’ in western countries.