ABSTRACT
This chapter critically discusses the global rise of anti-stigma and mental health awareness campaigns. These public health programmes largely follow biomedical explanations of mental distress and are therefore complicit in the continued subjugation of alternative knowledges about mental distress. Through an exploration of anti-stigma discourse in the Time to Change campaign and its predecessors, this chapter looks at the role of language used to talk about the relationship between mental distress and discrimination in legitimising existing hierarchies of power in the global politics of mental health. Drawing on scholarship from Mad Studies, survivor research and user-controlled research, this chapter provides an anti-sanist analysis of the deployment of (anti-)stigma as a dominant narrative in the global effort to tackle ever-rising numbers of diagnosable mental disorders. This chapter contributes to the field of Mad Studies more broadly by highlighting the importance of continued reflection on the legitimation of knowledge through academic discourse and the kind of voices being heard in the process.
