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Cultural diversity is crucial for African neuroethics

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Mental health, neuroscience and neuroethics researchers must engage local African communities to enable discourses on cultural understandings of mental illness. To ensure that these engagements are both ethical and innovative, they must be facilitated with cultural competence and humility, because serious consideration of different contextual and local factors is critical.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge A. Hartford and F. Gilpin-Macfoy for their helpful comments on this publication. O.P.M. and L.M.K. are supported by the Intramural Research Program (IRP) of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), NIH. O.P.M. is an African Postdoctoral Training Initiative (APTI) Fellow funded by the NIH and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in partnership with the African Academy of Sciences, under the auspices of the Coalition of African Research and Innovation. J.d.V. is supported by a Research Development Award from the Wellcome Trust (WT222784/Z/21/Z) entitled ‘Incompleteness and the ethics of new and emerging health technologies: fostering African conversations on relational ontology, epistemic justice and academic activism’, which supported a visiting scholarship to the UCT Neuroscience Institute for C.A.A. O.P.M., J.d.V. and C.A.A. also gratefully acknowledge the Global Forum on Bioethics in Research (GFBR) for support towards attendance at the 2021 GFBR annual meeting, where they discussed some of these issues. The findings and conclusions in this Comment are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the US National Institutes of Health or any other institution.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Social and Behavioral Research Branch, National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA

    Olivia P. Matshabane & Laura M. Koehly

  2. HIV Mental Health Research Unit, Division of Neuropsychiatry, Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health, University of Cape Town, Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town, South Africa

    Lihle Mgweba-Bewana

  3. Department of Philosophy and Classics, University of Ghana, Legon, Ghana

    Caesar A. Atuire

  4. Department of Medicine, UCT Centre for Clinical Research and Neuroscience Institute, University of Cape Town, Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town, South Africa

    Jantina de Vries

Authors
  1. Olivia P. Matshabane
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  2. Lihle Mgweba-Bewana
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  3. Caesar A. Atuire
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  4. Jantina de Vries
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  5. Laura M. Koehly
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Correspondence to Olivia P. Matshabane.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Human Behaviour thanks Kaymarlin Govender and Judy Illes for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Matshabane, O.P., Mgweba-Bewana, L., Atuire, C.A. et al. Cultural diversity is crucial for African neuroethics. Nat Hum Behav 6, 1185–1187 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01436-1

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