ABSTRACT
This paper examines publicly available documents produced by the WHO regarding its ‘Mental Health Improvements for Nations Development,’ otherwise known as the WHO MIND project.1 As the quotations that open this paper demonstrate, the MIND project asserts a direct link between population health and national development, and promotes
DISABILITY AND COLONIALISM
the connection of national development to a particular way of conceptualizing and treating mental health issues. Yet, postcolonial studies have taught us to understand that every description of a problem contains within it an evaluation of and prescription for the problem so described (Bhabha, 1994). Thus, every international attempt to solve social problems contains within it a representation of the world and its people in need of such assistance. Informed by both postcolonial and disability studies, our interpretive sociological analysis of the texts of the WHO MIND project will show how it imagines human problems in terms of how nations and their populations can be made to fit within current dominant political and economic structures. We will show how the MIND project’s concept of problem people (re)produces a version of human suffering as a symptom of international disorder (DelVecchio Good et al., 2008, pp. 18-22). We read these descriptions of, and prescriptions for, the world and its people as an enunciation (Bhabha, 1994; Titchkosky, 2007) of the history of colonialism and thus as carrying forward the animating interests of this history. By resisting the notion that the WHO transcends its own history prescribing a decolonized future, we aim to show that the MIND project’s textual (re)production of humans and human suffering as global problems reflects the interests of a colonial past while also carrying forward these colonial interests into what might (mistakenly) appear to be decolonized present.2
According to Michael Fischer (2009, p. 261):
