Reflections on the use of mental health resilience concepts in migration and global mental health

Abstract

With the concept of resilience increasingly deployed across a range of issues in development studies—from conflict resilience to climate resilience—this paper considers the relevance of resilience concepts to current issues and concerns in global mental health. Resilience discourses can be seen as one response to the need for more holistic accounts of mental health that focus, not only on stressors and risk factors for mental ill health, but also recognize the sometimes overlooked capacities of people and communities to manage and coproduce their own mental wellbeing. For example, migration forms the backdrop to global mental health for a significant proportion of the world’s populace. And yet, thus far, most literature on migrant mental health has tended to focus on risk factors and stressors with comparatively little consideration given to potential sources or resources for positive mental health and coping with adversity. Nevertheless, while concepts of “resilience” are increasingly advocated in development studies and global mental health contexts, such concepts also have their critics. For example, resilience rhetorics can “depoliticize” by appearing to normalize otherwise unacceptable circumstances which might—from post-development and other alternative critical perspectives—be viewed as politically constituted through-and-through.