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Mental health professionals, including psychoanalysts, have lately been giving increased attention to the cultural location of their theories and techniques. The roots of this contemporary interest are twofold. First, deriving from the Civil Rights and Community Mental Health Movements of the 60s are democratically inspired efforts to serve the underserved, to provide culturally appropriate mental health services to diverse people. These efforts have become more salient as North American and British societies have become more culturally diverse. The other root is a contemporary preoccupation with elucidating underlying culturally specific values and assumptions in theory and in normative practices in a variety of fields. Deconstructionism, of which this unpacking of values and assumptions is part, can help to correct for the ways in which political and socioeconomic hierarchies and privileges are perpetuated by marginalization and implicit devaluation of those who are culturally different. The colonial mentality is a case in point. The valuation of technical rationality in European culture since the Enlightenment, as evidenced by industrial development, gave the rationale required for the colonial powers to promote the “development” of Third World peoples by conquering them.
The first of the books under review here, Mental Health in a Multi-Ethnic Society, edited by Suman Fernando, addresses mental health service provision in postcolonial England. Fernando sets the stage in his introductory chapters with a demonstration of how