Mental Health Policy: A Complex History

Cross-National Diffusion of Mental Health Policy

Background Following the tenets of world polity and innovation diffusion theories, I focus on the coercive and mimetic forces that influence the diffusion of mental health policy across nations. International organizations’ mandates influence government behavior. Dependency on external resources, namely foreign aid, also affects governments’ formulation of national policy. And finally, mounting...

Mental Health Policy Adoption as a Seminal Event: A Response to Recent Commentaries

Mental health policy in Africa.

81 In 2007, a landmark series of papers on mental health appeared in The Lancet. 1 Some of the key messages emerging from the series were that mental disorders are inextricably linked with other concerns: there can be " no health without mental health " ; mental disorders affect people in all societies, but especially the disadvantaged, vulnerable and poor; mental disorders are a leading cause ...

Mental health policy and practice

The book provides a well documented basic overview of the main developments and dilemmas in the field. It contains eleven chapters, the first sketching conceptualisations of mental illness and public health issues over time, especially the divide between the medical model and the social causation model developed in antipsychiatry. The second chapter resumes developments in policy making on stra...

[The mental health care model in Brazil: a history of policy development from 1990 to 2004].

This article analyzes the underlying conditions in the development of Brazil's national policy for mental health care from 1990 to 2004, with the aim of identifying the priorities in each historical stage of the policy, based on a review and analysis of rulings and other official documents issued by the Ministry of Health during this period. Four stages in the mental health care policy are disc...