Mental Health in Kenya: Tensions Between Human Rights Approaches and Colonial Care

The mental health situation in Kenya has been termed a silent epidemic threatening the mental wellbeing of the population. Deeply entrenched stigma and discrimination is systematic and directly influences access to mental health care, human rights violations, and social exclusion. Despite commitments to improve mental health care infrastructure, the ongoing impact of colonization perpetuates biomedical responses to mental health. Kenya ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in 2008 though mental health, criminal, and civil laws continue to be in violation of the Convention. We take a human rights and equity lens to critically analyze the biomedical dominance in mental health policy and practice. We employ an intersectional analytic framework to contextualize experiences of mental health injustices and apply aspects of an Intersectionality Based Policy Analysis Framework to the Ministry of Health’s Kenya Mental Health Policy 2015-2030 (2015) and the Ministry of East African Community (EAC) Labour and Social Protection’s National Plan of Action on Implementation of Recommendations made by the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2016) to explore how policy discourses influence understandings of mental health and responses. We analyze a disjuncture between human rights and social determinants framings of mental health in policy, and how a default to western biomedical solutions for addressing mental distress dominate institutionally and in practice. We urge the Kenyan government to abolish coercive mental health practices, remove systemic barriers that hinder participation, and establish supports to empower people with psychosocial disabilities and their organizational representatives (USP-Kenya) to ensure mental health responses are consistent with international human rights treaties.