Global mental health research and practice: a decolonial approach.

The global health movement is having a paradigm crisis-a period characterised by a questioning of one's values, goals, and sense of identity. Despite important advances in population health worldwide, global health and global mental health often produce and reproduce power imbalances and patterns of oppression and exploitation that perpetuate the current modern world system (ie, Eurocentric, capitalist, and patriarchal) and its entangled global hierarchies (eg, gender, economic, epistemic, and linguistic). A consensus is emerging to decolonise global mental health, but it is not clear how to move from rhetoric to action. In this Personal View, we aim to share our experiences and the practices developed in the context of the COVID-19 health care workers (HEROES) Study. To do so, we present our HEROES decolonial team approach, which comprises three underlying principles: epistemic justice, pragmatic solidarity, and sovereign acts. We have developed decolonial team practices such as co-creating communication spaces to foster horizontal and equitable dialogue, locating and managing the study database in Chile, and ensuring local teams' rights and access to the data without barriers.
Competing Interests: Declaration of interests ER-S is supported by the US National Institute of Mental Health (grant number: R34MH120179) and by the US National Institutes on Minority Health and Health Disparities (grant number: U54MD007579). EvdV is supported by Veni (grant number: 09150161910016). RH-T is supported by University of Rochester CTSA (grant number: TL1 TR002000) from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the US National Institutes of Health. AR-P is funded by the US National Cancer Institute (grant number: 1R21CA233449). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the US National Institutes of Health or any other funding agency.
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