Developing countries (a term often used interchangeably with low- and middle-income countries) account for the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. There is a huge burden of mental illness coupled with deficits in mental healthcare resources and infrastructure that perpetuates a high treatment gap in most developing countries. Good quality scientific research can help in understanding the challenges and evaluating solutions to improve mental healthcare delivery. However, there is a substantial scarcity of research from developing countries. This chapter discusses the unique nature of strengths and challenges with respect to mental health and provides examples of successful scientific mental health research with public health implications from developing countries. The feasible solutions to improve mental healthcare research across individual, organisational, and national level in developing countries given the unique strengths and deficits are discussed in detail.

Focusing on the implementation of southern seas history (nan’yō shi) at the Japanese imperial university in Taipei under Murakami’s tutelage, the chapter examines the effects of colonial knowledge practices on imperial Japan’s expansion into Southeast Asia. Drawing inspiration from postcolonial studies and decolonial thought, the chapter maps out how Murakami, along with his students and peers, researched, disseminated, and ultimately marginalized Indigenous and local agency in Southeast Asian and Taiwanese history. It examines the long-term historiographical effects of relying heavily on European colonial records, curricular and language choices, and a general overemphasis on Japanese historical agency.

The other facet of adaptation, immutability or homeostasis, is discussed. Dynamical system models that buffer external changes in a few variables to suppress changes in other variables are presented. In this case, some variable makes a transient change depending on the environmental change before returning to the original state. This transient response is shown to obey fold-change detection (or Weber–Fechner law), in which the response rate by environmental changes depends only on how many times the environmental change is to the original value. As for the multicomponent cell model, a critical state in which the abundances of each component are inversely proportional to its rank is maintained as a homeostatic state even when the environmental condition is changed. In biological circadian clocks, the period of oscillation remains almost unchanged against changes in temperature (temperature compensation) or other environmental conditions. When several reactions involved in the cyclic change use a common enzyme, enzyme-limited competition results. This competition among substrates explains the temperature compensation mentioned above. In this case, the reciprocity between the period and the plasticity of biological clocks results.

This chapter examines how Emmanuel Dongala employs the symbol of China in his fiction to criticize one-party rule in the People’s Republic of the Congo. The symbol is part of a larger invocation of Third Worldism as a key geopolitical and intellectual backdrop for African literature during the twentieth century. The chapter explores the contradictions between postcolonialism and “scientific socialism” via the figure of the “African Mao.” As a symbol, Maoism functions as a paradox in Dongala’s work, inspiring idealism and catalyzing disillusionment; it manifests in characterization (dress, speech, and action) as well as in rhetorical figures (stream of consciousness, intertextuality, and malapropism). The chapter shows how the trope of China crystallizes the perils of Congolese postcolonialism when vernacular convention contests the dogma of revolutionary tautology.