Byline: Vincenzo. Di Nicola

This essay introduces the sociopolitical notion of the Global South as a bridge between globalization and the global mental health (GMH) movement that offers an emergent apparatus or conceptual tool for social psychiatry. A brief history of the Global South reveals that it is wider and deeper than economic and geopolitical notions such as the Third World, the developing world, and the nonaligned movement across a broad swathe of history and culture. I then turn to globalization and its critics, examining critiques of economics, human rights, and problems associated with humanitarian services. A feature of GMH, 'the health gap,' is contrasted with 'the epistemic gap,' a divide between the epistemologies of the North and emergent Southern epistemologies. Three key features of the Global South - conviviality, porosity, and syncretism - are discussed with examples from my practice of social psychiatry with consultations in child psychiatry and family therapy in Haiti and Brazil. Finally, the Global South is affirmed as a conceptual and clinical apparatus for social psychiatry.

El sur está aquí al lado.

The South is here, at our side.

- Boaventura de Sousa Santos[1]

Globalization encompasses paradoxes. On the one hand, its very definition is large, suggesting movements that circle the globe. Common to many definitions of globalization are worldwide interactions both private and public, personal and commercial, migration and movement of people, trade and transactions, and dissemination and transfer of knowledge and skills. The trend is toward international connectedness, with 'intensification of social relations' (sociologist Anthony Giddens), 'incorporated into a single society' (sociologists Martin Albrow and Elizabeth King), a 'flattening' of international rules and barriers (journalist Thomas Friedman), leading to 'compression of the world,' and 'consciousness of the world as a whole' (sociologist Roland Robertson). While cutting across many domains of human activity, often positive as in the transfer of knowledge, both analyses and critiques usually center on socioeconomic and sociopolitical factors. After the fall of the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence around the world, globalization has been cast as the triumph of liberal democracy with Fukuyama[2] venturing so far as to declare this combination of open trade with democracy as 'the end of history.' This triggered sharp responses from both the left and right of the political spectrum. In Specters of Marx , Jacques Derrida dismissed Fukuyama's declaration of the 'death of Marx' as the 'New Gospel' of 'Christian eschatology.'[3] Samuel Huntington argued that a temporary reprieve from the conflicts of the Cold War ideologies would revive a more ancient 'clash of civilizations,' citing Islam in a clash with the West as an example.[4]

On the other hand, these same global trends trigger local and regional reactions in what we may call a desire to differentiate the local and the particular from the global and the universal. In this essay, I would like to outline the history and scope of one of these efforts to differentiate peoples with the emergent notion of the Global South, using with examples from my work as...