The Alan J Flisher Memorial Lecture is held annually in memory of Prof Flisher who was a pioneer in the field of public mental health in South Africa and a world-renowned scientist, academic, mentor and mental health professional. This year, Prof Leslie Swartz delivered the lecture.

“All over the place: an undisciplined look at global mental health”
by Prof Leslie Swartz

(5 November 2024)

Leslie Swartz is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at Stellenbosch University.  He and Alan Flisher were undergraduates together at UCT, where they both studied psychology and mathematics in their first degrees.  Leslie is editor-in-chief of South African Journal of Science and of Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research.  Much of his current work is focused on supporting emerging researchers. His largest current research project focusses on addressing language barriers to mental health care, and he is working on a book reflecting on the academic landscape in South Africa through a lens of care ethics, and dealing, amongst other things, with the politics of epistemic exclusion.

The establishment of the Alan J Flisher Centre for Public Mental Health in 2010, shortly after Alan’s death, marked an important milestone.  Not only were we putting a new, and hybrid, discipline on the map in Africa, but we were also breaking boundaries across institutions and disciplines.  Some of the impetus for the work came from the unruly impulses of scholars like Alan; it is at the edge and the margin, often, that interesting new things grow.  In this talk I do my best to honour Alan’s vision not by trying to emulate him but to reflect on global mental health from what may be seen as the margins – chiefly, the world of disability rights and access, the struggles around language and access to mental health care, and the inevitable reproduction, through boundary-breaking work, of the very problems we seek to solve.

View the presentation below or download pdf (2.6 MB)