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

Ana Vinea is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She has a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the City University of New York. Her research focuses on medical practices and religion in the Middle East.

What is your article “Psychiatry, Law, and Revolution: A View from Egypt” about?

The article examines the controversies stirred in Egypt by the passing of a human rights-based legislation in 2009, “Law for the Care of Mental Patients.” It is an important act, intended to bring the country’s mental health system—suffering from chronic underfunding and resource gaps—in line with global standards of care. Yet, as readers can discover in the article, the law was surrounded by controversies from the beginning. The article offers an analysis of these debates that reveals the diverging notions of medical authority and responsibility, patient autonomy, and the profession’s place in Egyptian society that animated them. In the aftermath of the 2011 Egyptian uprising, discussions about the 2009 law became tied with assessments about the revolutionary moment and reflections on the future of the country. In this sense, the article is concerned with this intertwinement between psychiatric reform and historical transformation. tools for assessing mental health and illness among Kannada-speaking populations.

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

For some time now, I have been fascinated with thinking anthropologically about how different ontologies, epistemologies, and forms of being in the world intermingle, coexist, or clash. At first, I pursued this theme in the domain of family structures and religious practices in Romanian-Egyptian mixed marriages. My current research engages and deepens this intellectual concern into the domain of affliction and health at the intersection of biomedicine and Islam. I am pursuing this interest in my current book project, Healing Muslims: Islam, Psychiatry, and Therapeutic Dilemmas in Contemporary Egypt, which focuses on a reformist form of spirit exorcism and the debates it has stirred in the past decades especially among psychiatrists. In the context of this research, I have also developed an interest in societal and especially medical debates, as the ones I focus on in this article.

What drew you to this project?

I came to this project unexpectedly. When I was in Cairo conducting research for the book mentioned above and interviewing psychiatrists as part of that study, I learned about the 2009 law and heard the different opinions mental health professionals had about it. While this was not really part of my main research topic, I was fascinated not just by the diversity of positions but also by the many misunderstandings on which such positions were partially based. I decided then to collect these different takes on the legislation, hoping that one day I will be able to analyze and publish something on the subject.

What was one of the most interesting findings?

I conducted this research soon after the 2011 Egyptian uprising, and from the start it was striking how divergent takes on the mental health legislation became conduits for thinking about what was going on in that hopeful but uncertain political moment. It was interesting to trace how mental health connected the political and the psychiatric, as both dealt on different levels with questions of freedom, rights, and state power. As I see it, in that fleeting historical moment, the work of reimagining psychiatry also became a way of reimagining the nation.

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now? (Doesn’t have to be anthropological!)

I was recently on a long-haul flight where I watched Wim Wenders’ 2023 film Perfect Days. Such a beautiful movie! I am currently reading A Map of Home, a novel by Arab American writer Randa Jarrar. For my work I am reading Alan Klima’s Ethnography # 9 and skimming through the chapters of an edited volume called Psychiatric Contours: New African Histories of Madness.

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

I hope that the article shows how and why psychiatric reform is so complex and unpredictable sometimes, especially when it might be most needed. Listening with attention and openness to a variety of positions towards a specific psychiatric reform, in this case mental health legislation, carries the promise—if nothing more—of finding a path of change that stirs less opposition, and is thus more effective.