Psychiatric Imperialism in India

Abstract

When Thorazine was approved as a drug for the treatment of schizophrenia in the mid 1950s, the psychiatric profession believed they had demonstrated that mental illness was a brain disease, which could be treated with psychotropic medication. Because the medical model had always prevailed over alternative explanations, the discovery of Thorazine was heralded by the proponents of the medical model as putting the nail in the coffin of psychological approaches. Instead, it raised the debate to a qualitatively different level for opponents of the model. China Mills’s Decolonizing Global Mental Health: The Psychiatrization of the Majority World is the latest book to criticize the medical model and its application to the majority world in general and in particular the Global South (India), which has a population of 1.2 billion people, second largest in the world. The author’s major point is that treatment toward the mentally ill can be defined as “psychiatric imperialism” (p. 6). Mills believes that treatment of the mentally ill by the psychiatric profession, in collusion with the pharmaceutical industry, is comparable to the imperialism inflicted by European nations with their use of military, economic, and political forces to subjugate its colonies. The author’s unique and critical analysis hinges on an examination of the policies toward the mentally ill in India adopted by three groups: the World Health Organization (WHO), the Movement for Global Mental Health, and nongovernmental organizations.