250 Timothy J. Beck and Jacob W. Glazier
Whereas [some] studies depict both Indians and Melanesians as
‘dividuals’ when compared to the Western ‘individual’, when the Indian
person is compared to the Melanesian person, they appear to be as starkly
distinct from one another as each is from the (supposed) Western
‘standard’. This so-called Western individual is, of course, also a highly
problematic category. (p. 51)According to Smith (2012), rather than thinking about Western
subjects as individuals, in the Western, Enlightenment sense, and all others
as dividuals, it could be more productive to think about each person as
being composed of both individual and dividual elements to various
degrees. This aligns with trends toward the decentralization of mental
health services outlined above, insofar as abnormal psychology is steadily
becoming more reliant on networks beyond the individual person in theory
with computational models—as well as in practice—regarding the
collection of data across social contexts.
The problems described above with how abnormal psychology is
becoming more decentralized through neoliberal policies are even more
concerning when situated in relation to globalization. Bhargavi Davar
(2014), for instance, criticizes both ‘global mental health movements’ and
popular narratives about the ‘burden of mental disorders,’ as neo-colonial
extensions of earlier historical projects that imposed Western cultural
norms unto Indian communities. China Mills (2014) speaks similarly about
the danger of ‘diagnostic creep,’ where a greater variety of experiences
worldwide are being encoded into Western psychiatric terms. While
Kirmayer and Pederson (2014) caution, furthermore, that such trends have
unwittingly shifted the focus away from important structural (i.e.,
socioeconomic) issues that are so often at the root of psychological
suffering, especially in what tends to be referred to as the ‘global South.’
Such critiques point to the complicated ways that psychological suffering
is simultaneously unique to local cultural conditions while also being
affected by global movements to capitalize on mental health markets—
otherwise referred to as neoliberalism (Cosgrove & Karter, 2018).
Economist Edward Nik-Khah (2017) adds to this: “a peculiar
epistemology resides at the heart of the neoliberal worldview. The