Plural Narratives of Reform: Comparing Mental Health Transformations across Time and Place

This panel invites contributions examining processes of mental health reform, deinstitutionalisation, and service transformation across diverse historical periods and geographical settings. While dominant accounts often present reform as a linear transition from institutional confinement to community-based care, recent scholarship has highlighted the plurality of trajectories through which psychiatric systems have been criticised, reorganised, and reimagined.

Building on sociological and historical approaches that emphasize the situated character of reform processes, the panel seeks to explore how different actors, institutions, political projects, and social movements have shaped mental health transformations in distinct contexts. Particular attention will be given to tensions between continuity and rupture; local innovation and international circulation; state-led and grassroots initiatives; and the varying meanings attributed to concepts such as community care, recovery, citizenship, participation, prevention, and social inclusion.

We welcome contributions from sociology, history, anthropology, public health, social policy, and related fields addressing topics such as:

• Histories of psychiatric reform and deinstitutionalisation;
• Comparative analyses of mental health systems;
• Community-based and alternative models of care;
• Global circulation of psychiatric knowledge and policy models;
• Reform processes in low- and middle-income countries;
• Institutional persistence and unintended consequences of reform;
• Service-user movements, activism, and advocacy;
• Contemporary challenges to mental health systems.

The panel aims to foster dialogue between historical and contemporary perspectives, as well as between experiences from the Global North and Global South, in order to develop a more nuanced understanding of how mental health systems change over time.