Cultural Therapy and Social Engineering

Abstract

Postcolonial objectives in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are psychosocial re-engineering rescue programs to combating social subservience and psychopathology spawned by four-hundred-year history of European colonialism. Deinstitutionalization and rehabilitation were implemented in the Jamaican Mental Hospital in 1962 by the introduction of community decentralization and therapeutic communities. Psychohistoriographic cultural therapy was pioneered in the 1970s to facilitate the decolonization process. Significant success in these programs unmasked dormant and submerged personality disorders in the society. The University of the West Indies pioneered a primary preventative mental health institution—the Caribbean Institute of Mental Health and Substance Abuse in 2007—to design and implement primary prevention social re-engineering programs to promote mental health and wellness. The nineteenth-century European psychiatry practices that ghettoized psychiatry from the mainstream of medicine by segregating mentally ill ‘aliens’ in custodial Lunatic Asylums have been successfully negated by the mental health cultural therapy decolonizing blueprint.