As faculty in an Indian university, we have to contend with the broader agenda of socioeconomic development no matter which discipline we are located in. While fields such as economics, sociology, and political science have long been intertwined with development studies, psychology has remained relatively disconnected from these critical discourses. Conversely, development studies has engaged less with the psychological dimensions of human experiences of structural violence, inequality, and social change.

This talk proposes a critical psychology approach as a means of bridging this disciplinary gap. Critical psychology, as a marginal subfield, challenges mainstream psychological practices that often individualize mental illness (the mind) without considering broader systemic contexts (the market). It also critiques cultural framings of healing (meaning) that draw uncritically on non-Western religious traditions. Instead, critical psychology offers structural analyses of complex socio-psychological phenomena—such as the global rise of religious/personality cults, narcissism, and authoritarianism as well as mass shootings in the US—by situating them within neoliberal logics rather than reducing them to individual pathologies.

This presentation traces intellectual resources of critical psychology to Indian scholars like Ashis Nandy, Anup Dhar, and Sudhir Kakkar, as well as global critical voices such as Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Frantz Fanon, Michelle Fine, Nikolas Rose and Felix Guattari, and calls for an urgent dialogue between psychology and development studies, advocating for a justice-oriented approach to global mental health and sociopolitical change more broadly.