Climate disasters and global social medicine

Henry suffered a stroke in 2008, 3 years after Hurricane Katrina destroyed his home in New Orleans's Lower 9th Ward, a historic Black community. His diabetes had worsened in the aftermath of Katrina as he struggled to find pharmacies with insulin and other necessary supplies. His wife, Gladys, blamed the stroke on the receipt of a second denial-of-funds letter from the Road Home Program; without that assistance, they could not rebuild their home. The stroke left him paralysed. Gladys did her best to care for him, but she saw Katrina as the disaster that never ended. The couple tried to remain optimistic in their small Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trailer, but in 2009 depression became another of their medical problems. Revitalising global social medicineWhat is global social medicine? This group of art of medicine essays argues for a revitalisation of the field of social medicine as a way to reaffirm a health agenda that promotes human rights and social justice. This approach requires understanding the histories of social medicine in diverse locations, the decolonisation and democratisation of knowledge flows in global health, and a more explicit acknowledgment of the historical and structural conditions that shape the burden of disease and the opportunities for health care and caregiving. Full-Text PDF Mutual aid, pandemic politics, and global social medicine in BrazilIn the face of persistent neglect and denial of the severity of COVID-19 by the administration of President Jair Bolsonaro, residents in many of Brazil's favelas have been left to organise their own responses to the pandemic. Community leaders have raised funds and volunteers are going door-to-door to distribute food, masks, and hygiene kits, using megaphones to educate residents about mask use, physical distancing, and handwashing. Local journalists are also using social media to counter fake news, and activists are converting schools into isolation wards, facilitating cash transfers, and fighting for the accurate documentation of COVID-19 deaths. Full-Text PDF Promises and perils of mobile health in Burkina FasoMobile health (mHealth) has attracted much attention in the global health community as a technological fix that can short-circuit inadequate health-system infrastructure and build access. But like many other technology-based approaches to remedy structural health inequities, mHealth interventions can be overhyped. We discusses here [email protected], an mHealth network launched in 2013 by the Centre de Recherche en Santé de Nouna (CRSN), Burkina Faso, with funding from the International Development Research Centre, Canada. Full-Text PDF The social in psychiatries: depression in Myanmar, China, and JapanIn the wake of new ways of calculating disease burdens through disability-adjusted life-years, depression emerged as the world's second most common disorder after cardiovascular disease, affecting more than 264 million people worldwide. In Asia, depression as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and the International Statistical Classification of Diseases (ICD) has also become far more recognised and diagnosed over the past two decades. On the surface, this change seems to underline the universality of the neurobiological model of depression. Full-Text PDF Infant mental health in southern Africa: nurturing a fieldThe promotion of early cognitive and emotional development is a core aim of the field of infant mental health (IMH). Yet models of early development and IMH have often been developed for high-income settings, and sometimes carry under-examined assumptions about care and wellbeing. Although this discipline is well established in Euro–American contexts, questions have been raised about how to tailor it to contexts that may differ considerably from those in which these models were developed. The ways that care, attachment, and relationship are given form in everyday practices are not universally the same, raising the challenge of shaping therapeutic models and interventions so as to ask appropriate questions, design context-sensitive interventions, and meet caregivers and infants in ways that are meaningful to them while still retaining general applicability. Full-Text PDF