Research on severe mental illness in Indonesia: A scoping review

Indonesia is a country of immense socio-cultural and economic diversity in Southeast Asia. Over the past century, Indonesia epitomized a colonial and post-colonial scientific laboratory for developing early interventions in international health, transcultural psychiatry, and Global Mental Health (GMH). Psychological and psychiatric anthropology have greatly benefited from research on the interplay between culture, mental health, and illness in Indonesia. Given the impact research on severe mental illnesses (SMI) in Indonesia has had on the development of GMH and adjacent disciplines, this review aims first, to provide a systematic review of the scope of SMI research in Indonesia. Second, it aims to identify potential gaps in the literature, cross-country collaborative networks, and traveling concepts of mental health and illness. Third, it points to entanglements between cultural concepts and illness experiences. We focused our search on the PubMed database and discovered 110 relevant records to review. We found a heterogenous body of literature that shows the complexities of being confronted with or living with SMI in Indonesia. We also identified a reliance on high-resource settings for mostly quantitative research. Some limitations appear to be, accounting for cultural hyperdiversity, limiting population samples, and relatively few geographical areas covered in the studies. Inspired by recent commentaries in Global Health research, we suggest more solidarity with low-resource settings and more horizontal approaches in international mental health and illness research. Ultimately, we highlight the need for GMH research and researchers working in contexts of hyperdiversity to ask more culturally sensitive questions.