Intersections of Mental Health, Psychiatry, and Education in the Global South: Key Insights and Challenges

The interaction between mental health systems, educational institutions, and contemporary psychiatric frameworks is deeply shaped by historical, cultural, and political factors. While global mental health initiatives have expanded substantially over the past two decades, models developed in high-income countries often fail to translate seamlessly into low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). This is particularly true when they insufficiently account for local epistemologies, institutional constraints, and entrenched social inequities. In many Global South contexts, psychiatric knowledge circulates alongside indigenous, community-based, and informal systems of care, producing mental health landscapes that challenge universalized assumptions about diagnosis, intervention and effectiveness. Effective mental health strategies must therefore integrate local knowledge, address systemic inequities, and adapt psychiatric and educational models to diverse contexts, rather than relying on decontextualized solutions. This aligns with broader critiques of global mental health that emphasize power asymmetries and call for more reflexive, context-sensitive approaches.

Educational institutions, particularly schools, have emerged as central sites for mental health promotion, prevention, and early intervention in LMICs. This is largely due to the scarcity of specialized psychiatric services and the extensive reach of education systems, making schools key entry points for mental health initiatives. Contemporary scholarship increasingly argues that schools are integral components of child and adolescent mental health systems, whose roles extend beyond promotion and prevention to include early identification, referral coordination, family engagement, and collaboration with health and social services. Simultaneously, schools actively shape how psychiatric knowledge is operationalized. Through policy, screening, assessment, referral pathways, and pedagogical routines, schools participate in defining which forms of distress are recognized, which behaviors are problematized, and which students gain access to support. This raises critical questions about medicalization, normativity, and equity, especially in stratified educational systems. The intersection of psychiatry and education is thus deeply political.

Empirical research on school-based mental health programs in LMICs shows promising but highly heterogeneous effects for youth wellbeing, depression, and trauma-related symptoms. This variability is increasingly attributed to implementation conditions, including institutional capacity, workforce preparation, policy alignment, and cultural fit. Programs are more likely to succeed when embedded within coherent school mental health systems, supported by leadership, and aligned with local educational priorities. Furthermore, many international guidelines emphasize whole-school approaches, yet implicitly assume levels of infrastructure and intersectoral coordination often unavailable across Global South contexts. This mismatch underscores the need for research examining how policies are enacted, adapted, or resisted in practice.

From this perspective, implementation science has emerged as a crucial framework for understanding how mental health interventions translate into real-world educational settings. Advancing school mental health globally requires moving beyond efficacy studies toward models that explicitly address system readiness, implementation drivers, and sustainability. This resonates strongly with calls for dialogue between mental health research and implementation sciences to bridge gaps between evidence, policy, and practice.

This Research Topic therefore seeks to bring together interdisciplinary research examining how mental health systems, educational institutions, and contemporary psychiatric frameworks interact in contexts characterized by structural inequality, limited resources, and diverse cultural understandings of wellbeing. Rather than treating mental health, psychiatry, and education as separate domains, this Research Topic approaches them as interdependent systems, whose interaction shapes how distress is recognized, classified, governed, and addressed across the Global South.

Accordingly, this Research Topic will focus on five interrelated areas:

• School mental health and youth wellbeing in LMICs, including promotion, prevention, and early intervention;

• The relationship between psychiatric models and educational policy, with attention to governance, classification, and equity;

• Community-based and culturally grounded approaches to mental health care, including plural and hybrid systems;

• Implementation challenges and opportunities in Global South settings, drawing on implementation science and systems thinking; and

• Comparative analyses of policy, service delivery, and innovation across Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

The goal is to create a space for empirical, theoretical, and critical contributions illuminating how mental health and education systems operate in the Global South. It seeks to advance context-sensitive frameworks, particularly those informed by implementation science, to support equity, justice, and culturally responsive care. By foregrounding schools as institutional actors and emphasizing systemic transformation, this Research Topic aims for a more integrated and politically informed understanding of mental health, psychiatry, and education in the Global South.