Conflict and antagonism within global psychiatry: A discourse analysis of organisational responses to the UN reports on rights-based approaches in mental health

Abstract

Between 2017 and 2020, the UN Special Rapporteur (SR) Dainius Puras published three reports that called for significant changes to organisation, funding and service provision in mental health care in ways that emphasise inclusive, rights-oriented, democratic and sustainable community health services. This article aims to examine formal organisational responses to the UN mental health reports and consider the underlying arguments that either support or delegitimise the SR stance on the need for a paradigmatic shift towards a human rights-based approach to mental health. By combining several different search strategies to identify organisational responses across the web, a total of 13 organisational responses were included in the analysis. Given the political nature of the responses, concepts from discourse theory were used to analyse the responses. The analysis showed how the responses articulated two binary positions and contesting articulations of good mental health care, which formed a backdrop for rejecting the SR reports in defence of psychiatry. The discussion elucidates how the responses tend to resemble previous ways in which critique has been dealt with mainly by ‘biological psychiatry’, but that the counter-critical nature of the medical and psychiatric organisational responses remains in contrast to the broader reception within the UN community.