All too often we talk about “psychiatric globalization” as a fait accompli: the inexorable spread of Western diagnostic categories, therapies, and conceptions of mind throughout the world. This sense of inevitability prevails across political divides: those affiliated with the project of global mental health applaud the arrival of biological framings to the developing world, while critics bemoan the imperialistic effects thereof. Yet both perspectives are in their own way solipsistic. As Whitney Duncan proposes in her persuasive monograph, any study of “psy-globalization” must grapple with the ambiguous and at times contradictory view from below. Her analysis of mental health in contemporary Oaxaca finds significant evidence for the emergence of new “psy-imaginaries” and “psy-socialities,” coexisting alongside persistent gaps in the state's psychiatric infrastructure.
With this ethnographic study, Duncan seeks to intervene in a broader debate about the implications of psy-globalization, which she usefully divides into psychological and psychiatric globalization. Psychological globalization...