1 The Political Economy of Mental Health in India Anup Dhar Anjan Chakrabarti Pratiksha Bannerjee Psychology is in need of its own Das Kapital. Lev Vygotsky, The Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology Marx writes in the section on ‘The Method of Political Economy’ in Grundrisse: “even the most abstract categories, despite their validity – precisely because of their abstractness – for all epochs, are nevertheless, in the specific character of this abstraction, themselves likewise a product of historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these relations” (1993: 105). Marx had in mind the category of labor. Mind, psyche, reason, madness, health are however no exceptions. They are also the product of historical relations and they possess their full validity only for and within these relations. Medicine, psychiatry, psychology and the clinic also need to be seen within the “historical constitution of [their] own practices” and the “political-economic conditions in which [they] became possible” (Parker, 2011:1) as also the epistemological culture medium within which they grew roots (Foucault, 2006). The “invention of the mind” by Descartes as “mirror of nature” (Rorty, 1979: 357) and the “Cartesian progression of doubt” as the condition of the “great exorcism of madness” (Foucault, 2006: 244) would therefore serve as philosophical signposts and historical roadmaps in our foray into the political economy of mental health. The account of the Indian state, its ‘first transition’ into a developmental regime post-1947 and its ‘second transition’ into neo-liberal forms of globalization post-1989 (Chakrabarti, Dhar and Cullenberg, 2012: 200-282; Samaddar and Sen 2012: 1-8), the movement from ‘welfare medicine’ to ‘development medicine’ to ‘neo-liberal medicine’ (Zachariah, Srivatsan and Tharu, 2010: 9-23) shall also serve as relational pointers to Generated by Foxit PDF Creator © Foxit Software http://www.foxitsoftware.com For evaluation only.