A Critical Approach to Abnormality 251individual human can never match the epistemic power of markets;
therefore, goes the argument, markets should assume primary
responsibility for generating knowledge” (p. 3). This in turn renders
“markets... the greatest information processor [ever] known” (Mirowski,
2015, p.11). This is especially relevant given the ways that data on mental
health has become a commodity that can be collected through mobile apps
and sold to third parties for them to use for purposes ranging from
marketing to surveillance (Huckvale et al., 2019). With the internet being a
now global phenomenon, this is no longer a problem specific to the ‘First
World’ as opposed to any imagined other. Rather, the collection and
circulation of data across markets of global capitalism is a unifying force
with which all cultures are now forced to engage.
As a counter to the centrifugal forces of contemporary capitalism,
decentralization also leaves room for what in colonialist language might be
framed as more indigenous practices of dealing with mental wellbeing to
emerge and be taken seriously (Lohokare & Davar, 2010). Indigeneity,
here, is used hesitantly to refer to practices and techniques that offer an
alternative or are even subversive to the typical methods used by the psy-
professions—not that this refers to native applications that can somehow
be envisioned outside the scope of imperialism, but nevertheless conveys a
sense of openness to ways of living that are other than what is considered
normal in contemporary Western democratic societies. We say hesitantly
here to flag how this concept, ‘indigeneity,’ has the potential to be used by
colonizers to render other those peoples that have possessed a genealogical
and geographic relationship to specific locations and spaces. Yet, the term,
at least here, may be helpful in languaging those various communities who
have traditionally inhabited these singular expressions of otherness.
On the level of psychosocial treatment, for instance, indigenous
approaches may include practices ranging from remote healing, meditation,
shamanic rituals, to other more spiritually grounded or animistic
interventions. These strategies for health and well-being developed out of
different cultural traditions than Western psychiatry (Taitimu et al., 2018),
making them less implicated with the professional authorities (e.g., the
APA) that grant abnormal psychology its perceived legitimacy. Put