NEOLIBERAL SUBJECTIVATIONS AND SOCIAL SUFFERING: global mental health policies in times of neoliberalism

Abstract

The objective of this article is to analyze global mental health policies in the post-pandemic context and within the broader framework of neoliberal hegemony. To this end, balance documents from the first decades of the World Health Organization and two recent documents on mental health policies and actions and the global mental health report will be analyzed. The approach will be ethnographic reading of documents. Reading these documents seeks to understand how a certain hegemonic way of apprehending suffering is reflected (either as reproduction or resistance) in mental health policies and especially in global health policies. The proposal is based on the observation that the specific form of neoliberal subjectivations refers to specific ways of producing and dealing with suffering and afflictions. The fundamental question, from the perspective of the anthropological approach to health, is how a social experience of suffering is produced as a psychological, psychiatric or biomedical problem in general and to what extent this matrix of the subject’s apprehension responds to a neoliberal reason.