Welfarist psychiatry goes global

Mental health problems represent a significant proportion of the global burden of disease yet receive a disproportionately low level of funding. The situation is especially fraught in low- and middle-income countries. This has motivated a concerted international effort to address global mental health. We argue that a welfarist approach to psychiatry will support this effort better than the dominant Western approach to psychiatry because it provides better tools to negotiate a variety of challenges. These challenges include the risk of entrenching flawed aspects of Western psychiatry in new populations, the neocolonial imposition of Western mental health norms, reducing stigma toward mental illness, and preventing the use of psychiatry for immoral or political ends. Welfarist psychiatry corrects significant flaws in the Western psychiatric model, avoids neocolonialism by indexing aspects of patient welfare to the local sociocultural context, reduces stigma by abandoning the concept of "normal" mental health, and provides grounds to restrict the misuse of psychiatry by appealing to objective aspects of personal and social well-being.