The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Neil Armstrong is a Student Mental Health Research Associate, Kings College London and Fellow in Harris Manchester College at University of Oxford. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Theology. Additionally, he has a Master of Science in Teaching and Doctor of Philosophy in Social Anthropology.

What is your article “Is it Still Ok to be Ok? Mental Health Labels as a Campus Technology” about?

Is it Still Ok to be Ok? Mental Health Labels as a Campus Technology is about how students engage with mental health labels in new ways. Our ethnographic data show that although labels can still be a source of stigma, they are also something students use. Labels can facilitate interaction with academics and administrators; be used as a pliable means of negotiating social interaction; be creatively directed towards self-discovery; and can even be a means of promoting sexual capital and of finessing romantic encounters. So rather than being fixed and burdensome, labels emerge as flexible, fluid and contextual. To try to capture the usefulness of labels, we call them ‘campus technologies.’ Our findings give pause to quantitative mental health research that relies on labels having clear and simple meanings. But, equally, concerns about the power of labels to medicalize students also appear undermined.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

I am a medical anthropologist who uses ethnographic methods to make lived experience of mental health problems legible to clinically engaged research.  I am interested in mental health bureaucracy, in particular how ideas like accountability might conflict with care quality. Currently, I am researching student mental health and assessing what it might mean for universities to become compassionate. Collaborative Ethnographic Working in Mental Health was published by Routledge in December 2023.

What drew you to this project?

I became concerned that the social science literature on mental health labels was out of date. Looking around on campus I could see that students engage with labels in creative and productive ways and that the literature had not caught up. The SMarTeN project provided me with an opportunity to work with students to coproduce a paper exploring their experiences with labels and relating this to ideas in the academic literature (https://www.smarten.org.uk/).

What was one of the most interesting findings?

A lot of research into student mental health assumes we can easily understand what people mean when they fill out questionnaires that use mental health labels. Perhaps this was true in the past. But our ethnographic work suggests that today, the meanings of key terms like ‘depression’, ‘anxiety’ and ‘wellbeing’ are not fixed but fluid. Students actively engage with mental health labels to negotiate their life on campus. This suggests we might need to rethink how we conduct research, and particularly our reliance on quantitative data.

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now?

I recently finished John Burnside’s beautiful and heartbreaking memoirs A Lie About My Father and Waking Up in Toytown. I’ve been listening to Blaze Foley and watching Severance.

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

We need to revisit what we think we know about young people and mental health. Things may not be as they appear.

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