Around 75 per cent of those who take their own lives are in low and middle-income countries. The WHO’s response to this alarming fact has been to promise a rapid scale-up of access to anti-depressants and anti-psychotics. The problem with this solution, Rachel Aviv suggests in Strangers to Ourselves, is that modern psychiatry was ‘not designed to address the kinds of ailments that arise from being marginalized or oppressed for generations’. Further, the promotion of pharmaceuticals over local or alternative therapies encourages those suffering ‘to look into themselves as if they were the cause of social ills’.
So strong has this approach been that even the former head of the American Psychiatric Association, Loren Mosher resigned in 1998, citing how psychiatry had ‘been almost completely bought out by the drug companies’ and that the profession no longer sought ‘to understand whole persons in their social contexts’.
