The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.
I am a sociologist interested in the politics of mental health policy in Latin America. My research examines how service users, health workers, and policymakers approach core normative categories such as “human rights,” “community,” and “participation.” I utilize sociological systems theory and post-Marxist political philosophy, empirically drawing on ethnography and oral history.
What is your article “Psychiatric Experiments with “Community” Under Dictatorship and Authoritarianism: The Case of the Protected Commune Experience, 1980–1989” about?
This paper explores the paradoxical existence of the “Protected Commune” (PC), a unique therapeutic initiative within Chile’s El Peral psychiatric asylum during the oppressive military regime from 1973 to 1990. This period saw the dismantling of emergent plans for deinstitutionalization and mental health reform initiatives, the banning of community-based mental health approaches, and the silencing of progressive psychiatrists through torture and exile. Amidst this authoritarian repression, the Protected Commune emerged as a unique attempt to transform El Peral Psychiatric Asylum into an isolated microcosm, mimicking a real town with new relationships running parallel to traditional hospital hierarchies to simulate the life of an “outside” that was no longer accessible. This case study is part of an ongoing project aiming to develop a global genealogy of “community” as imagined and implemented in the context of psychiatric reform in South America, under hostile political and social conditions.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.
My work addresses ongoing debates at the intersection of two broad shifts in the politics of knowledge in global mental health. These shifts pertain to 1) the evolving role of service users and individuals with lived experience in mental health science and policy and 2) the recognition of the “global south” as a site of intellectual originality and a source of lessons in global health for the wider world. These interlocked shifts represent an epistemological and political challenge to traditional understandings of pathology and treatment and to the institutions implicated in their global circulation, mostly based in the Global North.
What drew you to this project?
After graduating in sociology in Chile, I started working in social services supporting persons with psychosocial disabilities. In the interface between the social sciences and mental health policy,
psychiatric asylums and their transformations emerged as a crucial object of attention. On the one hand, plans for the transformation of psychiatric care are directly shaped by wider political and social transformations, making this process a powerful site for sociological analysis. At the same time, the social and cultural aspects of deinstitutionalization are often concealed under a traditional public health perspective, especially in South America, and therefore a sociological perspective has the potential to contribute to policy solutions in the area.
What was one of the most interesting findings?
The Protected Commune experience was, in itself, an interesting finding. I started this project with a wider question about psychiatric reform and its interaction with the dictatorship in Chile. It was in that context that interviewees mentioned the initiative, and after this, I partly refocused the project in order to learn more about it.
What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now? (Doesn’t have to be anthropological!)
I’m reading a book by Michael Löwy called Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,”translated and published by Verso in 2005. This work by Löwy is a great introduction to Benjamin’s thought, a key author to understand how notions and usages of “history” are related to present struggles.
If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?
You cannot transform institutions without understanding their history. A key aspect of that history includes the previous attempts to transform them, which are always many in the case of psychiatric asylums.
Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 