The interdisciplinary field of Global Mental Health (GMH) emerged in 2007 when a number of researchers called for a concerted effort to scale-up mental health care around the world, especially in low-resource settings. Mental health, they argued, had been ignored by the international community for too long despite the prediction that depression would become the" leading cause of disability worldwide" by 2020. GMH's proposition to close the global" treatment gap" galvanized a diverse set of actors into a novel knowledge infrastructure, complete with its own institutions, journals, NGOs, and funding streams. Yet, critics held that western mental health knowledge was itself too contested to be exported, lacked cross-cultural validity, and relied on a biomedical model that would inadvertently replace cultural and communal ways of knowing and coping with distress. While GMH proponents argued in the name of a shared humanity, universal suffering, and mental health care as a human right, the critics emphasized the cultural specificity of both mental suffering and its treatment.