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

Dr. Tenzin Namdul is a medical anthropologist and Tibetan Medicine doctor. Tenzin is an assistant professor and the director of Tibetan Healing Initiative at the University of Minnesota’s Bakken Center for Spirituality and Healing. His research focuses on cognitive resilience, aging, death and dying, end-of-life care, and integrative medicine. 

What is your article Death and Happiness: Exploring the Temporalities of the Meditated Death and Everyday Life in Tibetan Buddhist Practice of Tukdam about?

This article illustrates how death and stages of dying are employed by Tibetan Buddhist practitioners as avenues to reframe individual’s relationship to oneself and others, and to engage in advanced meditation called, tukdam, that transcends clinical (biological) death. Although tukdam—a meditative state entered through various practices resting in extremely subtle consciousness while dying—is seen to only be achieved by adept practitioners, the philosophy and psychology that underpin tukdam inform Tibetan communities beyond just accomplished adepts and frame the very way death and dying is conceived. Furthermore, the article proposes that Tibetan Buddhist practices that culminate in tukdam symbolize the way death and dying is assumed to be approached more broadly beyond advanced practitioners, and thereby, provides a cultural model for an “ideal” death that guides approaches to dying for oneself and others. 

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

As a Tibetan medicine doctor and medical anthropologist, I incorporate my diverse training to examine how the intersection of bio-sociocultural factors and the intimate relationship between mind and body shape the ways individuals flourish, age, and die, as well as care for the dying. My current research is an interdisciplinary study of healthy aging among Tibetan Buddhist monks in India.

What drew you to this project?

My initial encounter with a Tibetan monk in the state of tukdam meditation where the practitioner kept his “dead body” intact for weeks in hot and humid weather not only blew my mind, but also compelled me to ask a series of questions that led to my ongoing work. Particularly, I wondered how such specific cultural practices intertwined with death and stages of dying impact the way community members perceive death, die, and care for dying people. 

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

I am currently reading two books in tandem: “The End of Trauma…” by Michael Bonanno and “A Suitable Boy” by Vikram Seth. Both of these books explore human relationships. social changes, and resiliency in the face of adversities.

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

I would emphasize the importance and need of finding confidence and joy rooted in loving kindness

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

Scott Stonington is a cultural anthropologist and internal medicine physician. His first book, The Spirit Ambulance, won awards from multiple academic societies for ethnographic writing. His two major current projects address affect in clinical practice in the U.S. and pain management in Thailand.

What is your article “Hallucination’: Hospital Ecologies in COVID’s Epistemic Instability“about?

In early COVID in the hospital, clinicians were driven into scientific and data-hungry frenzy trying to understand the virus, making their clinical practice very unstable, changing dozens of times daily in response to tweets, texts and news articles. The article is a case study on the dependence of clinical knowledge and practice on context, in contrast to the usual assumption that it is the “view from nowhere.”

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

I practice hospital and primary care medicine, which makes me constantly look at social theory and ethnographic concepts through the lens of lived experience. My research always seems to return to that.

What drew you to this project?

I was thrust into working in the hospital in early COVID, at a time when I thought there was a good chance that I would die if I became infected (due to comorbid illnesses). I simply had to study that experience.

What was one of the most interesting findings?

The most interesting finding was that clinicians, afraid and trying to sort through rapid-fire contradictory ideas about COVID, entered a kind of trance, a bad trip, needing to imagine (or “hallucinate”) virus distributed everywhere. It was interesting that the fear wasn’t simply formless emotion, but that it infiltrated the very scientific expertise that they had previously thought of as objective.

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

I just finished Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I thought it was just for pleasure, but there were so many wonderful ideas in it that it got my academic idea mill churning!

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

I think that we fantasize that doctors should be completely objective, and it blinds us to some of the very important effects that their own emotion and experience injects into health systems.

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

Liza Buchbinder is an anthropologist and internist. Her long durée engagement in Togo is the basis for a book on the limits of naming violence against adolescents through child trafficking discourses. She has also written on clinical ethnography and physician burnout for Cultural Dynamics, Journal of General Internal Medicine, and The Conversation.

What is your article “Clinical Ethnographies of the Politics and Poetics of the US Healthcare Crisis” about?

The contributors to this special issue, Ethnography of and in Clinical Formation: Poetics and Politics of Dual Subjectivity, are clinicians and social scientists, critiquing the clinical spaces in which they work caring for patients. Covering a range of topics, from the socialization of medical students to the everyday violence and brutal contradictions of “jailcare,” this special issue draws on differing perspectives from clinician-scholars working in diverse specialties and levels of training. The special issue themes emerge in contexts of an increasingly neoliberal corporatization of American society—made hyperreal with the second Trump administration–the alienation of physicians from patients, the dissolution of reproductive rights, and medicine’s reckoning with deep-seated structural racism and class inequities. This special issue embraces clinical ethnographic practice as a means of chronicling our rapidly changing era from worksites where we learn, practice, and spend much of our time.

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

I am an internist and anthropologist based at UCLA. I also work as a physician for a large urban jail in southern California. My research has largely focused on adolescent labor migration and critical human rights in West Africa, but more recently I have turned my attention to climate change and the cultural impact of deforestation in eastern Togo. As a practicing physician and social scientist, I have also engaged in collaborative projects on physician burnout, as well as clinical ethnography.

What drew you to this project?

I am fortunate to have worked with Seth Holmes and Philippe Bourgois for many years who are both inspiring and generous scholars. Philippe started an ethnography writing group of md/phd physician-scholars and the idea for this special issue emerged from this collective. As a physician and anthropologist, I have found this process of coming together with colleagues from across the life course of medicine (i.e. from student to seasoned practitioner) to ethnographically reflect on clinical practice to be extraordinarily powerful. And I am grateful to have had the opportunity to share this with a larger audience through the publication of this special issue.

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

I’m currently reading Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan and a collection of short stories by Anton Chekhov.

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

With clinical ethnography, I think the key takeaway is to keep writing those reflections! In the process of working through seemingly disparate and incoherent observations about one’s own practice and the often-uncanny world of clinical medicine, nuanced insights emerge that cannot be predetermined. This discipline can apply to other auto-ethnographic endeavors outside of medicine. Even if exhaustion hits at the end of a day, it’s important to take a moment to jot down words, phrases, lists, or any other form of note-taking to capture those small details that facilitate deeper understandings of the everyday.

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

Wolfgang Mastnak holds doctoral degrees in medical sciences, sports sciences, mathematics, arts therapies, music education and psychology. Artistic profile: piano, singing and composition. Main research areas: arts therapies, interdisciplinary music education, cross-cultural psychosomatics and psychiatry, health education, long-term cardiac rehabilitation and psycho-cardiology, perinatal health and quantum consciousness.

What is your article “A Chinese Dance Therapy Framework” about?

Traditional Chinese dances are brimming with health promoting and therapeutic potential. Consequently, genuine Chinese dance therapy is in the ascendant. Related psychiatric approaches involve a broad spectrum of principles such as ontological identity, social inclusion and collective support, aestheticisation and expressive catharsis, symbolic exorcism, trance and Buddhist mindfulness. The phenomena discussed in this article relate to a wealth of Chinese dance genres originating from various dynasties as well as cultural traditions of ethnic groups living in China. Moreover, the article sheds light on different epistemological backgrounds of Western diagnostic manuals and traditional Chinese views of mental diseases, complex understanding of pathologies and therapeutic dynamics. Multi-disciplinary research resulted in a theoretical framework that also should encourage interdisciplinary approaches, as well as inclusive transcultural psychiatry and related philosophy of science.ions.

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

Already as a child I was driven by the spirit of discovery, e.g. the difference of a living and a dead body, or how a brain, which is tangible, can generate thoughts and emotions, which are intangible. Throughout decades, the miracle of human beings has been the main focus of my research involving medicine, cultural sciences, anthropology and bio-psychological approaches such as the quantum mind. And I have been haunted by the question of how true my findings are, hence my deep interest in philosophy of science and the wisdom inhering in ethnic traditions.

What drew you to this project?

Living in Europe and East Asia I work in the realm of arts-based therapies, as well as culturally sensitive medicine and psychiatry. In this context, I sensed the huge gap between traditional forms of dance therapy and imported dance therapy such as dance movement therapy, which is, particularly in ethno-medical circles, often seen as sort of commercial colonialism. Consequently, a major incentive for this research was to sharpen the awareness of the wealth and enormous health promoting potential of Chinese dances, and to advocate their recognition within public health systems.

What was one of the most interesting findings?

There are anthropological similarities across different cultures world-wide such as trance and spirituality, mystical identity with arts, and rituals to enhance social and psychosomatic balance. Phenomena, however, differ considerably. Thus we may speak about an invariant anthropological core alongside the diversity of related manifestations and expressions. This specific interdependency may be a key to further findings in the domain of culture, medicine and psychiatry.

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

I’m reading (in the evenings) an older German book for children about a school housed in an old castle namend ‘Schreckenstein’, I listen to ‘French Latino – Historia de un Amor’, and I’m watching Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti.

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

That the arts are not just fun for leisure times but belong to the essence of human beings.

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

Neil Krishan Aggarwal is a cultural psychiatrist and social scientist. His research focuses on translating anthropological theories for clinical use and the cultural analysis of mental health knowledge and practices.

What is your article “Questions About Field Site, Method, and Clinical Translation for Psychiatric Anthropology.” about?

My article summarizes points of commonality and difference among the three finalists for Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry’s early-career investigator award. Each of the three finalists wrote about the possibilities of applying anthropological theories to psychiatric practices. I found it interesting how they chose field sites outside of the usual places where mental health care is delivered, such as outpatient clinicians, emergency rooms, day treatment centers, and inpatient units. In these papers, we see online forums, horse stables, and forensic clinics as the field sites.

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

I’m a psychiatrist and social scientist. I’m most draw to psychiatric and medical anthropology on the social sciences side. Anthropology offers a way of thinking and doing research that situates all of us in a historical, social, cultural, and political matrix. It’s a different way of thinking than clinical work that typically focuses only on patients and clinicians. As a person who comes from a minoritized ethnic, racial, religious, and linguistic background and who is interested in how minoritized folks access care, anthropological scholarship helps me identify shortcomings in current service delivery models.

What drew you to this project?

I’m at a stage in my career where I have security. I’m now a full professor. I have graduate students who I train in the research traditions which I belong to. I want to find ways of promoting junior social scientists, whether they are at the undergraduate, graduate, or early-career levels.

What was one of the most interesting findings?

Each of these authors undertook research outside of places where mainstream mental health services are delivered. This vantage point helps us see how ideas about mental health and illness can vary based on location. Clinicians tend not to think about how locations and their personal experiences influence the kind of information they receive from patients, but those factors are essential to the social sciences. How each author pursues these questions, along with their ramifications for psychiatric practice more broadly, is noteworthy. I encourage everyone to read the papers alongside my commentary.

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

I’m presenting on a panel about hauntology at the Society for Psychological Anthropology annual conference in a few months. I’ve been enjoying the immersion in the hauntology scholarship in anthropology and examining how this relates to my social science work on the Partition of British India in 1947. Partition led to the creation of India and Pakistan. Between 200,000 and 2 million people were killed, and millions were displaced. The idea that people live with memories, silences, and hauntings from this historical trauma is commonplace in both societies, as it is for much of the world where historical traumas occur at a societal level. Thinking about how these experiences are normative and might point to new ways to theorize about the self is what I’m most interested in at the moment. I’ve been analyzing my interviews, Partition films from India and Pakistan, and psychoanalytic scholarship.

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

The social sciences offer us ways to examine how medicine embeds cultural values and practices as science within a particular historical moment. Understanding how this embedment occurs is one way to offer constructive critiques about whose voices are included and not included in knowledge production so that we can build systems of care that are more inclusive of all people.

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

Wren Ariel Gould (they/them) is a PhD Candidate at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. They leverage critical political economy, critical rural studies, and critical psychiatry in considering LGBT mental health, with their research addressing this vital intersection (e.g. anti-trans health legislation, rural-urban movement).

What is your article ““Living Dead”: Trans Cooperations with Mad Necropolitics and the Mad Trans Coalitions that Might Replace Them.” about?

This article is first about how the eugenicist investment in “public hygiene” that led to widespread abuse of mad peoples through the early 20th century in the U.S. has been transmuted and rearticulated over the past 50 years (since deinstitutionalization), such that the U.S. welfare state and prison industrial complex augment traditional psychiatric hospitalization, ultimately continuing to undermine the viability of mad lives. However, these “mad death worlds” are considered in the context of trans depathologization efforts that often continue to endorse a medical lens that renders madness a “mental illness,” albeit with transgender subjectivity an exception. The article considers these depathologization efforts in the context of recent anti-trans legislation efforts and reiterates a coalitional/intersectional approach whereby mad, trans activisms may be more productive for mad and/or trans liberations.

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

I’m interested in queer and trans mental health viewed from a few critical perspectives, especially critical political economy. On the one hand, that means I’m interested in how U.S. states are trying to assume control over trans healthcare, especially from the perspective of a thorny political context in the U.S. But I’m also interested a broader U.S. political context and what it means for queer and trans mental health, mainly U.S. divisions between rural and urban spaces. I’m particularly interested in ideas about how urban spaces are (relatively) safe for queer and trans people, with more recent research considering how narratives of rural incompatibility with queer/trans life sometimes overlook or participate in a U.S. political economy that marginalizes rural places and peoples.

What drew you to this project?

This project emerged from a few places. First, it was inspired by my years in community (and forensic) mental health from 2012 to 2021. Throughout that time, I tried to incorporate critical psychiatric approaches into my work such that a guiding principle for me was that my perspective was not more valid than the individuals I served, who often were voices’ hearers or saw the world differently from how I did. Any attempt to destabilize those power asymmetries (between service provider and user) were often stymied by the medicalizing frameworks adopted both by service users and organizations. More, though, I witnessed how devastating social conditions, rather than “mental illness,” affected quality of life. Service users (I don’t know that anyone I served would want to be considered “mad”) were often creative and resourceful in the face of sanist architectures, so it would be a mistake to think of them as victims. But recent critical theory offered new language to name these sanist architectures as necropolitical, as disallowing life. This project also emerged from my positionality as a trans service provider, as I saw trans voices’ hearers and others with “severe mental illness” as being left behind by trans movements. The move to insist that being trans wasn’t a mental illness often implied a contrast with mad people, who had “real mental illness,” like schizophrenia. Those moves had devastating consequences for trans voices’ hearers, since their trans identity was under more scrutiny and suspicion. I wondered if a more productive pathway might be validating both trans and mad people as knowers.

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

I just finished Jeff VanderMeer’s Absolution, which was a fitting addition to his weird fiction Southern Reach series (he has been described as the “weird Thoreau” by The New Yorker). The novel returns to the world of Area X, in which alien technologies hybridize all organic matter, leading to surprising transformations. Though these technologies are destabilizing, the chaotic ecologies that emerge only pose an “existential threat” to corrupt government intelligence agencies, as Earth abides. In Absolution, VanderMeer seems to ask what the terms of forgiveness are, both at the interpersonal level, but also on the scale of the Anthropocene. Otherwise, I’m finally getting into the newest volume of Monstress, a fantasy graphic novel set in an alternate, matriarchal, pan-Asian setting that follows Maika Halfwolf, a teenager with a symbiotic relationship with an Old God who becomes embroiled in a war with the genocidal Cumaea (human witches).

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

When trans depathologization efforts leave mad people behind, they may unintentionally reinforce systems that undermine the viability of mad lives. The latter may even be self-defeating if trans depathologization efforts are unconvincing, such that a politics informed by trans and mad perspectives may be more productive.

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

I have worked at Surrey University for a little over 25 years and am currently a Professor in the School of Social Sciences. I am also the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Sociology.

What is your article “Entanglements of Technologies, Agency and Selfhood: Exploring the Complexity in Attitudes Toward Mental Health Chatbots” about?

A few years back, Christine Hine and I became really interested in conversational agents (chatbots) for mental health – and we wanted to know more about how people formulate their understandings of what might be appropriate in this space. We decided to interview a group of non-users who had experienced a need for support; as this group could imagine self as a therapeutic target unconstrained by the features of a specific actual chatbot. Focus groups started with a brief description of mental health chatbots before turning to discuss expectations, assumptions, understandings and attitudes.

With respect to some core findings, multiple forms of imagined ‘agency’ were operationalized within participant narratives. The most common was a form of agency where chatbots are treated as one dimensional objects which could enable people to achieve their goals. Chatbots were also afforded a ‘parasitic’ agency, as well as derided for having no agency.

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

Following my social science Masters degree I joined the Human Psychopharmacology Research Unit at the University of Surrey. At the time, this was one of Europe’s largest sleep labs and I found myself increasingly interested in the sociological aspects of sleep. To this day I remain immensely grateful that I then bumped into Professor Sara Arber. At that time there was not much sociological work happening in this area – although Simon Williams at Warwick certainly needs a mention here – and Sara had just started working on a sociological study of women’s sleep. I ended up doing a part-time PhD under Sara’s supervision, working with her on a study of couples’ sleep and publishing a range of papers on inequalities and sleep. The sociological aspects of sleep remain one of my core research interests and I am currently co-editing a collection on the global history of sleep and dreams and working on a project looking at adolescent sleep and mental health.

What drew you to this project?

There is also probably quite a long story here. Although being interested in sleep sounds quite focused, in reality it has led me to travel into areas ranging from health and medicine to family and masculinities. A lot of my current research happens at the nexus of sleep, technology and mental health. This project was formed in that space in the Venn diagram where technology and mental health touch and where I am particularly interested in the meanings of recovery and how these are shaped by – and shaping – technologies.

What was one of the most interesting findings?

I might be cheeky here and offer two. One of the concluding points in the article is that a range of traditions, norms and practices are used when people think about chatbots for mental health. Taking this forward might help us understand why there is such complexity in research on user attitudes and experiences.

The other thing I found really interesting is hidden a little in a footnote. One of the participants talked about using ChatGPT as a form of therapeutic tool. When alone, they would sometimes ask how it is, ask if it could suggest a song to help them feel peace and calm etc. If I am honest, at that point this hadn’t occurred to me as a possibility and raised a lot of exciting questions.

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

I am dipping in and out of Tony Blair’s book On Leadership. I feel I should say this is not because I am a Blairite (or a scholar of leadership). Blair came to power during the final weeks of my undergraduate degree and it really did feel like a huge event; not least of all because he seemed to be listening to a sociologist (Giddens).

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

Across my work – which often speaks to different disciplinary audiences – it is probably just that we ‘need to think beyond the individual’. Of course, I also hope that some of the complexities around ‘why’ and ‘how’ travel through but we probably have a bit more work to do here.

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

I am a cultural/psychological anthropologist with research interests in emotional distress and mental illness. Publications include individually authored studies of postpartum depression and borderline personality disorder and team authored studies of post-traumatic stress disorder. My work is motivated by an aim to apply anthropological concepts and methods toward mental health recovery.

What is your article “Stubborn Families: Logics of Care of a Family Member with Borderline Personality Disorder” about?

This study explores what care for a family member with borderline personality disorder (BPD) looks like in practice, according to parents’ and siblings’ narratives. I find the care efforts described in involved family member narratives merits our recognition—these were all stubborn families offering unwavering support—and our concern. Examination of their care leads to the fundamental understanding that family recovery cannot be an either/or situation. Rather, both the person with the mental health condition and the family members need supports to foster recovery. This work aims to register the critical importance of family recovery and the absence of explicit, culturally inflected moral norms and the deficient structural supports for this goal.

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

Over the past several years, I have been studying emotional distress, related mental health diagnoses and recovery. Research in Rio de Janeiro on reproductive health led me to examine women’s struggles with perinatal depression and anxiety and what helped them recover. I next worked on a qualitative project of a Minneapolis Veterans Affairs research team to understand what went wrong for veterans who either quit or didn’t benefit from evidence-based psychotherapy for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The current project concerns family member experiences of BPD at differing moments: parents’ growing awareness that their child’s distress isn’t garden variety adolescence, but something more/other; ongoing familial care struggles (the focus of this article); demoralization besetting parent caregivers when care doesn’t seem to help.

What drew you to this project?

I was drawn to the project from growing up with experiences leading me to find that mental illness has a significant impact on the whole family. For some time, my study of the topic was confined to reading memoirs and attending AAA sessions on mental illness. While completing a post-doc in epidemiology and community health, I realized I wanted to do research on how BPD affects families. While the public health literature on family “burden” of mental illness is extensive and worthwhile, thematic analyses of qualitative research missed important dimensions, that I found I could capture by eliciting and analyzing narratives of family experiences of BPD.

What was one of the most interesting findings?

I started interviews by reminding interlocutors that my focus was on family member experiences of BPD and then asked “Where do you think it makes sense to start?” The outpouring of stories of multiple mental health crises suggested families acted mostly in isolation from professional, community and cultural supports. Late in the interviews, when I asked how it all had been for them, people spoke very briefly and generally. Afterwards, it struck me that familial care took place without supports for or even mention of family recovery.

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

Don’t get me started! One fine memoir is Laura Flynn’s Swallow the Ocean, which conveys the experiences of young children whose mother lives with a serious mental illness. I have tended not to read short stories, but recently found this was a mistake when I read Alistair Macleod’s Island and Claire Keegan’s Foster and Small Things Like These. Both are devastatingly beautiful. Less by Andrew Sean Greer and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk are delightful stories with unforgettable narrators.

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

I hope that from reading the work people will deepen their understanding that mental illness has repercussions on the whole family. The main takeaway I wish for readers is to register that the family members of relatives with BPD whom I got to know were trying very hard to do the best they could, with almost no infrastructure of safety, guidance or respite under situations of risk and from a place of societal misunderstanding. A significant omission in our conceptualizing of care practices of family members of a relative with BPD is recognition of supports they need, both to provide better care, as well as for their own recovery.

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

Dr. Vaishali Raval’s research, teaching, and service focus on promoting global psychological science. Situated within contextually grounded global mental health, her research program focuses on developing culturally informed understanding of psychopathology as well as processes such as parenting, emotions, and developing culturally relevant intervention and prevention approaches.

What is your article “Training in Cultural Competence for Mental Health Care: A Mixed-Methods Study of Students, Faculty, and Practitioners from India and USA” about?

Our article describes the extent to which clinical and counseling psychologists in two diverse and complementary contexts, India and USA receive training in cultural competence. Based on surveys and focus groups, we found that trainees in India learn about cultural competence more through their diverse life experiences and clinical experiences, while those in USA learn about it through varying levels of coursework, as well as through clinical experiences. In USA, cultural competence training seems to be narrowly focused on a white, cis male perspective, and does not incorporate the experiences of trainees with diverse racial, sexual and gender identities. In both contexts, trainees highlight the enormity of cultural competence and how much there is to learn, while those in the US also highlighting the hesitancy in engaging in diversity related discussions. We conclude by outlining recommendations for training programs.

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

Informed by my lived experiences across communities in India, Canada, and USA, my program of research focuses on cultural foundations of psychological processes, with a focus on mental health. As an undergraduate student in psychology at the University of Toronto, I realized the narrow focus of psychological science on people living in the Global North, and limitations of such an incomplete science. This led me to pursue graduate training in clinical developmental psychology and then postdoctoral fellowship within the interdisciplinary setting of the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago to learn about cultural psychology. For the past 17 years as a faculty member at Miami University, I have been fortunate to work with undergraduate and graduate students and collaborators from India to advance the scholarly understanding of mental health problems like depression, anxiety and suicide, and to develop culturally relevant interventions.

What drew you to this project?

A hallways conversation with a colleague at Christ University in India, Dr. Baiju Gopal, laid the foundation for this project. I visited their university and was able to tour the psychology department where I met him, and we exchanged business cards. Then, we met over Skype to think about possible ways to collaborate. We submitted a grant proposal to the United States-India Education Foundation and it was funded!

What was one of the most interesting findings?

For me the most interesting findings are the insights from our participants: When you grow up in diverse communities in India, you begin your journey towards cultural competence as a child, and as one of the participants commented, trying to teach someone to be culturally competent after they enter college might be too late because they might be set in their ways. Diverse life experiences early on can build a foundation for life-long learning in cultural competence. Insights from students in USA with minoritized identities are also very important: when cultural competence is taught, the assumption is that the therapist is white, cis, and straight working with clients with minoritized identities. Space needs to be created for trainees with diverse identities, their experiences, and trainee needs.

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

I have been reading about decolonial theory and particularly the ways in which current psychological science practices may serve to recreate colonial inequalities. Two special issues of the Journal of Social Issues (Readsura Decolonial Editorial Collective, 2022) have been instrumental in helping me to learn about how we can move towards decolonial scholarship in psychology.

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

Developing cultural competence is a life-long process that requires the mental health practitioner to seek out professional development opportunities to continue to grow. Graduate coursework can provide a foundation that the practitioner can build on to engage in continuous learning.

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