The Psychiatrization of Poverty: Rethinking the Mental Health-Poverty Nexus

The positive association between ‘mental illness’ and poverty is one of the most well established in psychiatric epidemiology. Yet, there is little conclusive evidence about the nature of this relationship. Generally, explanations revolve around the idea of a vicious cycle, where poverty may cause mental ill health, and mental ill health may lead to poverty. Problematically, much of the literature overlooks the historical, social, political, and cultural trajectories of constructions of both poverty and ‘mental illness’. Laudable attempts to explore the social determinants of mental health sometimes take recourse to using and reifying psychiatric diagnostic categories that individualize distress and work to psychiatrically reconfigure ‘symptoms’ of oppression, poverty, and inequality as ‘symptoms’ of ‘mental illness’. This raises the paradoxical issue that the very tools that are used to research the relationship between poverty and mental health may prevent recognition of the complexity of that relationship. Looking at the mental health–poverty nexus through a lens of psychiatrization (intersecting with medicalization, pathologization, and psychologization), this paper recognizes the need for radically different tools to trace the messiness of the multiple relationships between poverty and distress. It also implies radically different interventions into mental health and poverty that recognize the landscapes in which lived realities of poverty are embedded, the political economy of psychiatric diagnostic and prescribing practices, and ultimately to address the systemic causes of poverty and inequality

67% firms in Jiangsu expect labor shortage

This document is part of a digital collection provided by the Martin P. Catherwood Library, ILR School, Cornell University, pertaining to the effects of globalization on the workplace worldwide. Special emphasis is placed on labor rights, working conditions, labor market changes, and union organizing.CLW_2011_Report_China_67_firms.pdf: 12 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

The Dispatch Labor System in China Questioned

This document is part of a digital collection provided by the Martin P. Catherwood Library, ILR School, Cornell University, pertaining to the effects of globalization on the workplace worldwide. Special emphasis is placed on labor rights, working conditions, labor market changes, and union organizing.CLW_2012_Report_China_dispatch_labor.pdf: 96 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Multilateralism as Terror: International Law, Haiti and Imperialism

Much of the liberal criticism of the Bush administration's prosecution of the war in Iraq has taken a legalistic form, decrying that law as 'illegal'. This criticism has often implied that US unilateralism has been definitional to the neoconservative project and the geopolitical moment, and that a contrasting and supposedly non-existent 'multilateralism' would be neither illegal nor objectionable. The overthrow of Haiti's President Jean-Bertrande Aristide in 2004 and the subsequent installing of UN MINUSTAH peace-keepers in the country was a model multilateral action, the fact of which should have problematised this model: its almost wholesale ignoring in the scholarly international law literature is therefore investigated. The intervention is understood as a successful imperialist action, and the argument made that multilateralism as much as unilateralism can easily be part of an imperialist strategy

China

Economic development processes in post-1949 China can be divided into two periods. In the first, 1950-70, the economy was extensively and intensively controlled by the state with a priority for developing heavy industries. In the second, since the 80s and known as the \u27reform period,\u27 the Chinese economy has increasingly been integrated with the world economy and relying on light (rural) industries as the prime motor of economic growth. Yet, in both these periods, Chinese policymakers shared the same \u27developmental\u27 philosophy in which social costs, that is the reproduction costs of human labour and nature, are largely ignored. The following is a critical sketch of government policies and their impact on the domestic population in these two periods

We are extremely tired, with tremendous pressure,” A Follow-up Investigation of Foxconn

_We_are_extremely_tired__with_tremendous_pressure___A_Follow_up_Investigation_of_Foxconn_Electronics.pdf: 505 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

The Toy Industry in China: Undermining Workers’ Rights and Rule of Law

Investigation conducted partly through worker interviews that detail instances of workers’ rights violations in eleven toy factories in Guangdong Province