“The stark reality for the vast majority of people in the non-Western world, transcending everything, is poverty. Currently one quarter of the global population lives in near destitution and 3.5 million children die of starvation annually. What is ‘mental health’ in this broken social world?” (Summerfield, 2012)

IN recent years, mental health has been attracting a lot of attention — globally as well as in Pakis­tan. Terms like ‘anxiety’, ‘depression’, ‘trauma’, ‘neurodivergence’ and ‘well-being’ frequently come up for discussion on public forums and social me­­dia.

In Pakistan “increasing awareness and decr­e­­asing stigma” about mental health has become quite fashionable. Telepsychiatry, helplines, on­­line platforms for connecting with psychologists and counsellors are making mental healthcare much more accessible to people.

On the surface, all this seems promising, but it begs a deeper que­stion: are we medicalising human suffering and distress in ways that obscure its social origins? A new book, provocatively titled Searching for Normal by Dr Sami Timimi, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and psychotherapist in UK’s National Health Service invites us to consider precisely this: how we understand and conceptualise distress, what are its root causes and how we respond to it.

Timimi describes a global mental health system in which distress and behavioural differences are increasingly framed as medical disorders requiring diagnosis and treatment.

Rather than viewing emotional suffering as a natural response to adverse social and economic conditions, we are encouraged to see it as a pathology — something inside the individual that needs fixing. Timimi calls this a “mental health........

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