236 Timothy J. Beck and Jacob W. Glazier
voices network (About HVN, 2019), emerging between the cracks in
professional care in often inventive forms.
Today, colonialism is present in mental health care systems in ways
that are more covert, yet no less intractable, than with prior generations.
This can include the rising cost of treatment (or who has access to care),
the ways certain diagnoses inexplicably appear in some populations more
than others, or with culturally relative behaviors unwittingly pathologized
by professionals from outside of a given community (Metzl, 2010). These
concerns are exacerbated by recent efforts to globalize the professional
reach of Westernized mental health care. As China Mills (2014) explains in
her book Decolonizing Global Mental Health:
[P]sychiatry’s journey out from the global North is made possible at
ground level by diagnostic and classificatory tools (such as the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual — DSM, and the International Classification of
Diseases — ICD), which are translated in order to travel across
geographical borders. This ‘diagnostic creep’ works as a form of
psychiatrization that frames increasing numbers of experiences, globally,
in psychiatric terms. (p. 9)Through such processes, diagnostic labels like depression become
“global categories,” with their social “burden... recast into market terms
and statistics” (Cosgrove & Karter, 2018, p. 672). Such concerns about
neoliberalism notwithstanding, ‘global mental health’ has coalesced into a
concerted movement with an underlying goal to infuse Western psychiatric
concepts and technologies into a growing variety of areas of human life.
Such trends can only be understood in relation to current conditions of
global capitalism and the growing marketization of mental health, personal
data, and psychotropic drugs.
In this chapter, we interrogate core assumptions and overview social
factors underpinning contemporary perspectives in abnormal psychology,
starting with the very concept of abnormality itself. In marginalizing the
social values and experiences of those being diagnosed, standard notions of
what is or is not abnormal remain wedded to colonial practices in ways that
are not always obvious to those on the receiving end of services—or even