The role of communities in advancing the goals of the Movement for Global Mental Health

This special section of Transcultural Psychiatry explores the local-global spaces of engagement being opened up by the Movement for Global Mental Health, with particular emphasis on the need for expanded engagement with local communities. Currently the Movement places its main emphasis on scaling up mental health services and advocating for the rights of the mentally ill, framed within universalised western understandings of health, healing and personhood. The papers in this section emphasise the need for greater attention to the impacts of context, culture and local survival strategies on peoples' responses to adversity and illness, greater acknowledgement of the agency and resilience of vulnerable communities and increased attention to the way in which power inequalities and social injustices frame peoples' opportunities for mental health. In this Introduction, we highlight ways in which greater community involvement opens up possibilities for tackling each of these challenges. Drawing on community health psychology, we outline our conceptualisation of "community mental health competence" defined as the ability of community members to work collectively to facilitate more effective prevention, care, treatment and advocacy. We highlight the roles of multi-level dialogue, critical thinking and partnerships in facilitating both the "voice" of vulnerable communities as well as "receptive social environments" where powerful groups are willing to recognise communities' needs and assist them in working for improved well-being. Respectful local-global alliances have a key role to play in this process. The integration of local community struggles for mental health into an energetic global activist Movement opens up exciting possibilities for translating the Movement's calls for improved global mental health from rhetoric to reality

Excavations at Iona Abbey 2017: Data Structure Report

Initial summary of 2017 excavations at Iona Abbey

Book review: Health promotion: a psycho-social approach - by Christine Stephens

Stephens, Christine, "Health promotion: A psycho-social approach," (Maidenhead: McGraw Hill/Open University Press, 2008) ISBN: 978033522208

Can community participation improve mental health in India?

LSE’s Catherine Campbell asks whether more psychiatrists and psychologists can improve mental health when emotional distress is caused by economic or social disruption

Social capital, social movements and global public health: fighting for health-enabling contexts in marginalised settings

Research linking health and social capital is often cited in relation to global public health policies and programmes that mobilise local community participation in health promotion in marginalised settings. A long-standing criticism of this body of analysis and action is its inadequate attention to the power inequalities that drive poor health, often linked to macro-social forces beyond the reach of local community activism. Supplementing social capital research with attention to more ambitious and wide-ranging forms of health activism tackles this criticism. It puts the reproduction and transformation of health-relevant power inequalities at the heart of social capital research and community mobilisation strategies. We use the South African Treatment Action Campaign as a prototype for expanding understandings of social capital for health promotion. Existing social capital work currently focuses on facilitating community mobilisation to create co-operative bonding and bridging social capital (networks of solidarity within and between marginalised communities respectively), as well as linking social capital (networks uniting marginalised communities and more powerful champions). We call for an expanded focus that takes account of how these co-operative networks may serve as springboards for community involvement in adversarial social movements. In such cases, these networks of solidarity serve as launch pads for various forms of demand and protest where the marginalised and their allies confront power-holders in conflictual struggles over health-relevant social resources. We illustrate this expanded framework with two examples of collective action for mental health: the Movement for Global Mental Health and the UK Mental Health User and Survivor Movement. Both seek to use bonding, bridging and linking networks as the basis for movements to pressurise power-holders to increase access to appropriate psychiatric services, adequate welfare support and social respect and recognition for people living with mental distress

Book review: uniting a divided city: governance and social exclusion in Johannesburg

Review of: Jo Beall, Owen Crankshaw and Susan Parnell, "Uniting a Divided City: Governance and Social Exclusion in Johannesburg" (London: Earthscan, 2002) ISBN 1-85383-921-

1989 The Analysis

https://jdc.jefferson.edu/analysis/1019/thumbnail.jp

Relative risk of HIV infection among young men and women in a South African township

The prevalence of HIV infection in Africa is substantially higher among young women than it is among young men. Biological explanations of this difference have been presented but there has been little exploration of social factors. In this paper we use data from Carletonville, South Africa to explore various social explanations for greater female infection rates. This paper reports on data from a random sample of 507 people between 13 and 24 years old. Subjects were tested for HIV, as well as other sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and answered a behavioural questionnaire. The age-prevalence of HIV infection differs between men and women with considerably higher rates of increase with age among young women. The age of sexual debut did not differ significantly between men and women (15.9 and 16.3 years, respectively) and below the age of 20 years there was no difference in the number or distribution of the number of sexual partners reported by men or women. The risk of infection per partnership was substantially higher among women than among men. Women have sexual partners who are, on average, about five years older than they are with some variation with age. Scaling the age-prevalence curve for men by the age of their sexual partners gives a curve whose shape is indistinguishable from that for women but is about 30% lower for men than for women. In terms of social explanations for HIV rates among women, the data indicates that this difference can be explained by the relative age of sexual partners, but not by other factors explored. In addressing the epidemic among young women it will be essential to deal with the social factors that lead young women to select their partners from older-age cohorts and that shape their sexual networking patterns

18 Dorset Ct.

The following poems and essays were completed by the author between October 2012 and April 2016