My project looks at the knowledge practices constitutive of “mental health” within the field of Global Mental Health (GMH) to bring into view how this heterogenous epistemic assemblage has re-articulated notions of mental health, truth, universality, and ultimately, the human.
Mental health is a notoriously unstable epistemic object, and its academic disciplines, psychiatry and psychology, are in perpetual epistemic crisis. Historians and anthropologists of psychiatry have long focused on how scientific facts and psychiatric disease categories were hardened, verified, and circulated along path-dependent infrastructures. They have shown how psychiatry never stabilized into Kuhnian paradigms or "normal science," how its knowledge base has remained contested, and how globalization relied on standardization and evidence-based medicine to render psychiatry true and transferable across time, space and diverse communities. Yet, how might this globalization story change if we were to take seriously the malleability and indeterminacy of the key categories of "mental health"? If we listened more carefully to the productive polyphony at the interstices between the different ways of knowing "mental health"? What might change in our understanding of the human — and ideas of the psyche, health, morality, and the good life — if we allowed the contours of "mental health" to be drawn by more than scientific actors and temporalities?
My work approaches "mental health" as an epistemic object that may not give rise to coherence and stability, but to ever shifting, functional truth claims about what it is to be human, entangled with others, and part of projects of change at different scales. The resulting monograph — Contingent Universality — explores how GMH knowledge practices exceed the biological, cultural, sociological, and psychological imagination of "mental health," and how this, in turn, escapes and challenges key analytics in anthropology, history, and sociology of psychiatry.