Psychotropic Childhoods: Global Mental Health and Pharmaceutical Children

Abstract

While the World Health Organization calls to ‘scale up’ access to psychotropic drugs for children in the global South, research from the global North has found that long‐term use of psychotropic drugs may be at best ineffective, or at worst harmful. Questioning what counts as evidence within the Movement for Global Mental Health, this article maps the physical, psychological and sociopolitical effects of increasingly global psychotropic interventions into children's lives. This psychiatrisation will be read alongside colonisation, leading to the uncomfortable question of whether every child should have the right to a psychotropic childhood.