Elias, L;
Singh, A;
Burgess, RA;
(2021)
In search of 'community': a critical review of community mental health services for women in African settings.
Health Policy and Planning
, 36
(2)
pp. 205-217.
10.1093/heapol/czaa140.
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Abstract
Community is deemed a central resource for the improvement of health, across disciplines, contexts and conditions. However, what is meant by this term is rarely critically explored. In Global Mental Health, considerable efforts in recent years have been directed towards scaling up ‘community’ approaches, with variable success, creating the need to better understand approaches to its use. Our study contributes to this need, through a critical review of studies engaging with the term ‘community’ in relation to women’s mental health services in African settings. Our review explored 30 peer-reviewed articles from the past 15 years, which were systematically evaluated for quality of evidence. Studies were then analysed using a blend of conventional and directed content analysis to unpack perspectives on the term’s use in intervention and phenomenological studies. We identified four broad categories of community: (1) place (shared geographical location or institutional affiliation), (2) practice (belongingness to a shared activity or profession), (3) symbols (meanings and experiences associated with shared community life) and (4) identity (diagnostic identity around a mental health condition). Analysis identified community of place as the most common primary focus of interest across the sample, with 80% of papers referencing this dimension. We noted that in studies where communities of practice were the focus, this was in relation to leveraging local knowledge to inform or support service delivery of intervention programmes, often designed by outsiders. Implications for future policy and mental health services research are discussed.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | In search of 'community': a critical review of community mental health services for women in African settings |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1093/heapol/czaa140 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1093/heapol/czaa140 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| Keywords: | Community mental health, women, mental health services, community, Africa |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute for Global Health |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10112897 |
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