Uncategorized

Interview with Alexander Brandt Ryborg Jønsson, Elizabeth Xiao-An Li and Anne Mia Steno

Posted by

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

Today, we are excited to bring you our interview with Mia, Elizabeth & Alex!

What is the article “Enacted Restoration of Selfhood: A Kierkegaardian Perspective on Self-harm Among People with Mental Illness” about?

The article is an exploration of the lived experiences of individuals engaging in non-suicidal self-harm and shows how self-harm is not only the experiential nexus of a complex relationship between the body and the world but also a mechanism for overcoming the self. Whereas self-harm within the context of mental illnesses has traditionally been researched and understood as symptomatic behavior, our contention is that self-harm can be described through the lens of ‘enacted selfhood’ as an analytical framework inspired by Søren Kierkegaard’s existential thought for shedding light on what more is at stake in self-harm among individuals living with mental illness.

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

Alex: I’m a social anthropologist with a focus on critical analysis of mental health and health services, particularly overuse and overdiagnosis. My work examines how diagnostic categories, practices, and technologies are produced and negotiated, and how they shape lived experiences, sustain promissory visions of biomedicine and generate broader questions of inequality and care.

Anne Mia: I’m a social anthropologist working within social psychiatry and welfare institutions. My research focuses on people living at the margins of welfare systems, attending to experiences of loneliness, not belonging, and everyday life under institutional conditions. Grounded in phenomenological approaches to the body, I explore how lives are shaped through movements between spaces, relations, and forms of care. Methodologically, I work ethnographically and with multisensory approaches to make present forms of experience that are often rendered difficult to articulate, asking how they are navigated, resisted, and reworked in practice.

Elizabeth: I’m a philosopher of religion and a Kierkegaard scholar, with particular interest in his concept of existence and critiques of systematic philosophy, the problems of conceptuality, and the relation between religious faith and reason as well as the development of existential thought more generally in 19th and 20th century European philosophy and theology.

What drew you to this project?

This article is a collaborative and interdisciplinary project between the three of us, but it was developed over different stages. Alex and Anne Mia conducted different field works on two different projects, both centering on lived experiences with mental illness. We’ve known each other since our university days and often discuss theoretical or empirical challenges. We both became curious when we noticed how conversations with interlocutors about their experience and reflections on non-suicidal self-harm did not seem to reflect the way in which this phenomenon has traditionally/predominantly been treated in existing research. Here self-harm remains marginalized both analytically and empirically as it is viewed as a mere symptom among individuals living with mental illness or “call for help”. However, what we, Alex and Anne Mia, experienced in fieldwork, showed that there was something more at stake in the question of self-harm: It took up a lot of space in conversations with individuals who self harmed, who had profound and extensive reflections on the way they experienced this, thought about it, and enacted it with many expressing it to be an act of deep existential import.

Alex later invited Elizabeth to collaborate, after hearing her speak about Søren Kierkegaard at the Young Academy of the Danish Royal Society, which we are both fellows of. Upon discussing the project, it became clear to us that Kierkegaard’s concept of existence and selfhood and his proto-phenomenological and existential approach could offer a theoretical framework that could encompass/shed light on the individuality, existential complexities and the many ambiguous and paradoxical ways self-harm was reflected on and described by individuals in their lived experience of engaging in self-harm.

The article is thus the result of a discovering deeper and mutually illuminating connections between our research interests and bringing these together in this joint interdisciplinary effort.

What was one of the most interesting findings?

That self-harm is not merely a call for help or a means of translating or displacing psychological pain into physical sensation; rather, it may be understood as an example of what we term “enacted selfhood.” While the linguistic and discursive dimensions are often foregrounded within social recovery frameworks, this research underscores the importance of attending to concrete, embodied experience. The body, too, articulates meaning: self-harm constitutes a form of expression to which we ought to remain attentively and analytically responsive.

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

Alex: I have been reading Glenn Bech’s Jeg anerkender ikke længere jeres autoritet (I No Longer Recognize Your Authority) which poetically explores experiences of societal inequality. I am the first in my family to even graduate from high school and his words really reflect my own experiences in childhood, but also broaden my understanding of the deep humanity present in the most difficult lives and fates among my interlocutors. I’ve been listening to Mahler’s “Symphony No. 3”, which I’ll be going to hear performed by Tivoli Copenhagen Phil & Odense Symphony Orchestra next month (and Elizabeth will join me!) but I generally like all kinds of music and am a very dedicated euphonium player in Copenhagen Brass Band.

Anne Mia: I am currently reading The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk, which explores the relationship between the affluent Kemal and the less privileged Füsun, and how Kemal assembles a collection of objects, such as one hundred cigarette butts, that come to narrate the story of their love. The novel simultaneously functions as a key to a physical museum, blurring the boundaries between fiction, materiality, and exhibition. Reading this work serves in part as inspiration for a current research grant application, as I am particularly interested in modes of dissemination and in how anthropological inquiry might intersect with aesthetics and literary form.

I have been listening extensively to Bach lately; and, as a mother, I have, perhaps less voluntarily, been accompanying my child’s engagement with Melodi Grand Prix, Denmark’s children’s version of Eurovision.

Elizabeth: I recently finished Ben Lerner’s new novel Transcription and just started re-reading Plato’s Dialogues. The next work of fiction I’ll be picking up is Anne Mia’s YA novel Akio from 2021, which very presciently explores a romantic relationship with an AI. As a Kierkegaard scholar, I’m endlessly fascinated with the struggles we humans have in communicating our thoughts and inner lives, and the ways in which our technology and media for communication can hinder and complicate our relationships with and understanding of ourselves and others. I keep coming back to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, but I have also been listening to a lot of David Bowie and Wet Leg these past weeks. In between comfort-(re)watching The Office and Gilmore Girls, my most recent trip to the cinema was to see Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama.

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

Not to dismiss or take for granted certain phenomena, behaviors or actions, but recognize the limits of categorization: As our exploration of self-harm shows it is necessary to take into account the individual and the particular context, which at the same time is not something we can simply understand and explain once and for all. As Kierkegaard underlines to try to turn human experience into circumscribed, universal concepts results in dissolving the reality we are attempting to grasp, because our concrete embodied existence as individuals is in movement.

Interview with Augustus Osborne

Posted by

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

What is the article “Embracing Pluralism: Rethinking Western Psychiatric Models for Equitable Global Mental Health” about?

This article is fundamentally a challenge to one of global health’s most comfortable assumptions: that what works in Boston or London will work in Freetown or Kampala, provided we translate it carefully enough. The global mental health movement has done genuinely important work in drawing attention to the enormous burden of mental illness in low- and middle-income countries up to 85% of people with mental health conditions in these settings receive no treatment at all. But in its urgency to close that treatment gap, the movement has largely exported Western psychiatric frameworks wholesale: the DSM diagnostic categories, pharmaceutical-centred treatment protocols, and individual psychotherapy as the gold standard of care.

My article argues that this approach carries real risks that are too often ignored. It can produce cultural mismatch where diagnostic tools built on Euro-American concepts of depression and anxiety fail to capture how distress is experienced and expressed in other societies. It can medicalise what is fundamentally social suffering, framing poverty, displacement, and structural injustice as individual disorders amenable to a prescription. And it can marginalise or displace indigenous healing systems traditional practitioners, religious leaders, community elders that communities trust and turn to.

The paper is not an argument against biomedical psychiatry. It is an argument for pluralism: a framework that values multiple healing traditions as equally legitimate, prioritises cultural adaptation and local leadership, and insists that equity not just coverage must be the measure of success. I draw on evidence from Zimbabwe’s Friendship Bench, community-based programmes in India and Pakistan, and hybrid models from Nepal and Uganda to show that locally grounded approaches are not second-best alternatives they are often more effective, more sustainable, and more meaningful to the people they serve.

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

I am a public health researcher based in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where I was born and trained. I hold an MSc in Public Health and a BSc in Biological Sciences from Njala University, and I have spent the past decade trying to understand and generate evidence about the structural forces that shape health and illness in Sierra Leone and across sub-Saharan Africa.

My research spans a wide range of topics: maternal and child health, health systems strengthening, infectious disease, health equity, and increasingly, the intersection of digital health and social determinants of wellbeing. I have authored and co-authored over 140 peer-reviewed publications, and I used to teach Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Njala

University, where I tried to pass on not just statistical methods but a way of thinking about evidence who produces it, who it serves, and whose experiences it tends to miss.

What connects all of my work is a preoccupation with equity with understanding why health outcomes are so unequally distributed, and with generating the kind of evidence that can actually move policy in the right direction. I use a range of tools ArcGIS for spatial analysis, machine learning for predictive modelling, NVivo and MAXQDA for qualitative work but the driving question is always the same: who is being left behind, and why?

Mental health sits at a particularly important intersection of these concerns. In Sierra Leone, the legacy of a decade-long civil war, the Ebola epidemic, and chronic poverty has created an enormous burden of psychological distress yet mental health services remain desperately under-resourced, and the frameworks imported to address the gap do not always fit the realities of the people they are meant to serve.

What drew you to this project?

Honestly, it was the gap between what I observed in practice and what the global mental health literature was telling me should work.

Working in Sierra Leone first as a surveillance officer during the Ebola outbreak, then in health systems research I repeatedly encountered situations where people in psychological distress were navigating between multiple systems of care simultaneously: visiting a biomedical clinic, consulting a traditional healer, seeking counsel from a religious leader. This was not confusion or ignorance. It was a rational response to a plural reality, where different systems offered different things and no single framework captured the full picture of suffering or healing.

Yet the global mental health literature I was reading largely treated this pluralism as a problem to be overcome, a sign of inadequate access to proper care rather than as a resource to be understood and built upon. I found that framing both empirically questionable and, frankly, troubling in its assumptions about whose knowledge counts.

I was also struck by the growing body of evidence from programmes like Zimbabwe’s Friendship Bench, which showed that community-embedded, culturally resonant interventions could achieve outcomes comparable to or better than imported Western protocols. That evidence deserved a more prominent place in the conversation about how global mental health should be organized and funded. Writing this paper was my attempt to make that argument systematically drawing together the critique, the evidence, and a concrete set of recommendations in a way that might be useful to researchers, practitioners, and policymakers working in this space.

What was one of the most interesting findings?

The finding that most stayed with me and that I think has the broadest implications is the evidence around stigma. The dominant narrative in global mental health has long been that the biomedical model reduces stigma by framing mental illness as a brain disease rather than a moral failing or spiritual affliction. The logic is intuitive: if depression is a chemical imbalance, not a character flaw, people should be less blamed for it.

But the evidence I reviewed tells a more complicated story. In several settings, the introduction of Western psychiatric labels increased stigma because these diagnoses were experienced as foreign, permanent, and frightening in ways that local idioms of distress were not. In rural China, medicalizing depression led to greater social distancing, not less. In Sri Lanka, Western diagnostic terms for schizophrenia were associated with new forms of social exclusion. The assumption that biomedical framing is universally destigmatizing turns out to be empirically unfounded and it is an assumption that has shaped enormous amounts of global mental health investment.

This matters because it illustrates a broader point: the risks of exporting Western models are not just theoretical. They play out in real people’s lives, in communities where the introduction of a foreign framework can disrupt existing social networks, undermine indigenous coping strategies, and create new forms of harm even while trying to help. That is a finding that should give the global mental health movement serious pause.

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

I am currently reading The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon which feels more relevant than ever to the questions this paper raises about knowledge, power, and whose frameworks get to count as universal. Fanon’s analysis of colonial psychiatry is remarkably prescient, and I find myself returning to it as a grounding text for thinking about decolonial approaches to global health.

In terms of listening, I have been following the Global Health with Greg Martin podcast, which does a good job of bringing together researchers and practitioners from the Global South in conversations that do not always make it into mainstream journals. There is something valuable about hearing researchers from Sierra Leone, Uganda, and Nepal speak in their own voices about the challenges and opportunities in their contexts.

And I have been watching with great interest and some anxiety about the ongoing debates about artificial intelligence in healthcare. My own research has moved increasingly into machine learning applications for public health, and the questions about bias, equity, and whose data trains the models feel very continuous with the questions I am raising in this paper about whose knowledge shapes global mental health frameworks.

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

The one thing I most want readers to take away is this: pluralism is not a compromise it is a superior framework.

I am aware that pluralism can sound like a polite way of saying “let’s include everyone and not make hard choices.” That is not what I mean. I mean something more specific and more demanding: that the most effective, most equitable, and most sustainable approaches to global mental health are those that genuinely value multiple healing traditions as legitimate on their own terms not as supplements to biomedical care, not as cultural window-dressing on Western protocols, but as systems of knowledge and practice that have evolved to address human suffering in specific social and historical contexts.

The practical implication is that funders, policymakers, and researchers need to stop treating the question “how do we scale up Western psychiatric models in low-income countries?” as the primary question of global mental health. The primary question should be: “How do we build mental health systems that are meaningful, accessible, and effective for the specific communities they serve?” Sometimes the answer will involve biomedical psychiatry. Often it will involve traditional healers, community volunteers, religious leaders, and social interventions that address the structural roots of distress. Almost always it will require local leadership, genuine community co-design, and the humility to recognize that the Global North does not have a monopoly on wisdom about how human beings heal.

That shift from export to partnership, from uniformity to pluralism is the action point I hope this paper contributes to.

Announcing our Co-Editor-in-Chief

Posted by

We are pleased to announce that Neely Myers and Elizabeth Nickrenz will now collaborate as Editors-in-Chief for Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Dr. Nickrenz is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Duquesne University. She completed her Ph.D.in Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago in 2012, and is the author of Living on the Spectrum: Autism and Youth in Community (NYU Press, 2020) and co-editor of Autism in Translation: An Intercultural Conversation on Autism Spectrum Conditions. She has been serving for the last year as Associate Editor for the journal and is excited to step up to a new position as an Editor-In-Chief alongside Dr. Myers. 

2025 Early Career Development Award Winner

Posted by

Congratulations to our 2025 Early Career Development Award winner, Harry Whittle, for his piece, Ronaldo on the Clapham Omnibus: Complex Recoveries in Complex Psychosis.

Harry is a psychiatrist and anthropologist in training. He is currently a doctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS University of London, where he is part of the Centre for Anthropology and Mental Health Research in Action (CAMHRA). Harry’s research focuses on ideas of recovery, rehabilitation, and community in mental health and mental health services, particularly in relation to people living with more complex, severe, and enduring forms of psychosis.  

When asked about his article, Harry said:

In the article, I think critically about recovery in psychosis. I ask how it complicates our understanding of recovery if we consider the experiences of people with the most complex forms of psychosis, who have inadvertently been excluded from much debate on this topic. Drawing on six months of ethnography on an inpatient psychiatric rehabilitation unit, the article centres around a man I call Shepherd, whose journey to becoming a more confident, calmer, happier person was characterised by caution, masking, social withdrawal, and scepticism towards hope. These are embodied practices that seem incompatible with many portraits of recovery in the literature. Yet, here, they enabled—or even constituted—Shepherd’s recovery. The social complexities and ambivalences in his story reflect not only how complex recovery can be, but also how complex people’s relationships with mental health services can be. During his lengthy psychiatric admission, the coercive structures of the hospital were difficult to separate from the time, space, and relative safety they afforded Shepherd, which allowed him to figure out his recovery for himself. If we oversimplify recovery by missing people like Shepherd, we risk structurally undermining the interventions—like inpatient rehabilitation here—that may best support them to live well.

Congratulations, well earned!

s11013-025-09931-6Download

Interview with José Carlos Bouso

Posted by

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

José Carlos Bouso is a Clinical Psychologist with a PhD in Pharmacology. As the Scientific Director at ICEERS (International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research & Service). José Carlos coordinates studies on the potential benefits of psychoactive plants, principally cannabis, ayahuasca, and ibogaine, with the goal of improving public health.

What is your article “Hallucinations and Hallucinogens: Psychopathology or Wisdom?” about?

“This text challenges the prevailing notion that hallucinations are exclusively associated with psychopathological states. It acknowledges that hallucinations can indicate psychopathology or neurological disorders but argues that they also commonly occur in individuals without any signs of psychopathology. The research suggests that certain types of hallucinations induced by hallucinogenic drugs may actually improve mental health. The authors propose a broader characterization of hallucinations as a common phenomenon associated at times with psychopathology but also with functional and even beneficial outcomes. Furthermore, they suggest that hallucinations can provide a pathway to understanding the mind and the world. This cultural shift in the interpretation of hallucinations could have implications for fields such as drug policy, civil law, psychiatry, and the reduction of stigma associated with mental disorders.”

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

“I am a clinical psychologist and PhD in pharmacology and have been studying the pharmacological and therapeutic effects of hallucinogens since the 1990s. My first research focused on studying the potential of MDMA in the treatment of PTSD in women who have suffered sexual assault. Later, I conducted a study on the long-term effects of ayahuasca use on neuropsychiatric functions. Since 2012, I have been the Scientific Director of the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education Research & Service (ICEERS), where I coordinate various research projects. Our main areas of research include Global Mental Health, ayahuasca, medical cannabis, and the anti-addictive potential of ibogaine.”

What drew you to this project?

“The term hallucinogens is stigmatized due to its association with mental illness. This reinforces the stigma surrounding mental illness by precisely linking it to the presence of hallucinations. However, hallucinations are not necessarily a pathological phenomenon. Even for Esquirol and other French psychiatrists who laid the foundations of modern psychiatry, hallucinations were seen as a symptom of illness, not the cause. Today, the symptom is often confused with the cause. Hallucinations are a common phenomenon in human experience. Their most radical expression is seen in the effects produced by hallucinogens, which are now the subject of increasing research on their therapeutic potential. The analysis of the term hallucinogen and its relationship, not only with psychopathology but also with the process of knowing, should not only help reduce the stigma associated with it but also the stigma associated with mental illness.”

What was one of the most interesting findings?

“Undoubtedly, the most interesting result is having confirmed how the popular conception of the term hallucination does not correspond to the reality of the phenomenon. Etymologically, it refers to traveling through the mind. Even in classical Greece, there was a goddess of hallucinations, the goddess Pasithea. Oracles used hallucinations to make their predictions. The Bible is filled with hallucinatory phenomena. Numerous human circumstances can induce hallucinations, with prevalence rates indicating that up to 10% of the general population has experienced them at some point in their lives. Neurobiologically, perception itself can be hallucinatory, including imagination. And hallucinogenic drugs demonstrate how hallucinations can be a source of knowledge. Therefore, the main result is that hallucinations can be a psychopathological symptom but also a via regia to knowledge.”

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

“I am currently reading several novels: “The Tartar Steppe” by Dino Buzzati, “The Family” by Sara Mesa, and “Prayer to Proserpina” by Sánchez-Piñol. I read “The Tartar Steppe” after visiting an exhibition by the Spanish sculptor Juan Muñoz and seeing an artwork inspired by the novel. Additionally, I am reading the new book by the biological anthropologist Juan Luis Arsuaga, titled “Our Body.” Recently, I watched a Spanish film called “Secaderos,” which explores the use of LSD by teenagers in a very open-minded manner. It was a surprise because I went to the cinema without having read the movie’s synopsis.”

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

“To start considering hallucinations as a normal phenomenon of human consciousness that can be a sign of psychopathology but also a source of knowledge. Hallucinogenic drugs are prohibited because they induce hallucinations. If our thesis is correct, their legal status should change as soon as possible.”

Thank you for your time!

Other places to connect:
Website
Twitter
LinkedIn

Interview with Neil Krishan Aggarwal

Posted by

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

Neil Krishan Aggarwal is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University. He 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 “The Evolving Culture Concept in Psychiatric Cultural Formulation: Implications for Anthropological Theory and Psychiatric Practice” about?

“Social scientists debate what terms like “culture” mean. This article traces how the term “culture” has been defined in editions of the psychiatric classification manual known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). It explores similarities and definitions in these definitions.

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

“I come from a racially, ethnically, linguistically, and religiously minoritized community in the United States. I’ve had to face people’s implicit and explicit biases about me based on my appearance. Therefore, I’m interested in how people generally make interpretations about others. We all make interpretations in everyday life, such as students rating professors, customers rating businesses, or people deciding which way to swipe on dating apps. Anthropologists have long pointed out that psychiatrists also make interpretations about patients through acts of diagnosis. This perspective informs my research interests in cultural psychiatry, cultural psychology, and psychiatric anthropology.”

What drew you to this project?

“I’ve spent the past 15 years trying to encourage mental health professionals to think of their work as fundamentally cultural, beyond just attending mandatory cultural competence trainings. I believe that my colleagues in anthropology have conversations that my colleagues in mental health benefit from hearing. Every revision to the DSM is an opportunity to explore the current state of cultural assumptions regarding mental health knowledge and practice. When DSM-5-TR came out in 2022, I saw this as a timely opportunity.”

What was one of the most interesting findings?

“The model of culture in the DSMs is different from other models that could change clinical practice. The DSM model assumes that providers can ask patients about their identities, that culture resides in the minds of patients. But a model of culture that looks at how patients and clinicians interact allows us to discover how patients and clinicians create culture during appointments.”

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

“I just finished reading this brilliant article by the black queer scholar Keguro Macharia titled “On Being Area Studied.” As one of the few brown men in my departments, I haven’t been equally accepted as a peer, so I’ve been re-reading Frantz Fanon and trying to imagine how he has felt.

I’ve been exalting in the 50th anniversary of hip-hop this year. No other popular art form provides more incisive social commentary about what it’s like to transcend social marginaliztion as a minoritized individual. I just saw DJ Premier in concert this week, and I’ve been inspired to rediscover the poetry of artists like KRS-One, Rakim, Nas, Biggie Smalls, Q-Tip, Jay-Z, and other greats. I’ve also been jamming to AP Dhillon, Gurinder Gill, Shinda Kahlon, and Karan Aujla on the Punjabi Bhangra side.

I love Hindi cinema. Streaming has really allowed movie stars to try new roles, and I’m captivated by a show titled Asur. Check it out.”

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

“Whether we use knowledge from psychiatry, psychology, the law, or any other form of professionalized expert knowledge, we can never fully know anyone else. How do we cultivate a space for respectful curiosity?”

Thank you for your time!

Other places to connect:
Twitter

Interview with Lawrence T. Monocello

Posted by

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

Lawrence T. Monocello is a T32 Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis. Lawrence Monocello received his Ph.D. in 2022 from the University of Alabama. His dissertation examined how cultural, social, and political-economic factors shaped disordered eating among South Korean men in Seoul. Currently, he contributes anthropological perspectives to a transdisciplinary team of world-class researchers on preventing/treating eating disorders and childhood obesity.

What is your article “Guys with Big Muscles Have Misplaced Priorities”: Masculinities and Muscularities in Young South Korean Men’s Body Image” about?

“Male body image research only makes up about 1% of the body image literature, and what literature does exist tends to focus on white, Western men’s concerns with muscularity. Using cognitive and biocultural methods, this article examines how young Korean men negotiate and navigate multiple cultural models of ideal male bodies. It not only questions the model of Western masculinity which underlies male body image research but also problematizes the notion of a single kind of “muscularity” to which men may aspire. Drawing on the concept of “masculinities”—the multiple, hierarchized, and increasingly hybridized ways of being male in a given society—this article advances the concept of “muscularities” to account for their multiple, hierarchized, and hybridized models of muscularity, not just as biological traits but as meaningful, embodied engagements with their social and political-economic conditions.”

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

“My research interests lie primarily in understanding how individuals’ variable engagement with culture affects health. In non-anthropological health research, culture—if it is considered at all—is usually treated as some sort of monolithic, categorical variable to which causality is attributed. Anthropologists have long challenged this notion, understanding that culture is dynamic, and that the lived experience of culture varies individual-to-individual and in relation with other social, political-economic, and demographic factors. However, connecting rich ethnography with broader models and measures of health has proven difficult. Cognitive anthropological mixed-methods, which combine rigorous ethnography and statistical modeling, have a ton of potential for connecting individuals’ lived experience of their meaning systems on their own terms to health outcomes. As I’ve been recently working in a biomedical context, it’s become increasingly evident to me that there is not only great opportunity, but moral necessity, for medical anthropologists to contribute our expertise and be more active in framing research on topics like social determinants of health.”

What drew you to this project?

“When I was a junior at Case Western Reserve University, I took The Anthropology of Body Image with Eileen Anderson. I remember reading some of the literature on male body image and being confused at how, as a white, cisgender male who struggled with body image, the data presented and conclusions it reached seemed not to apply to me that much. It got me really interested in intracultural variation and how it affected lived experience. Once I got to graduate school, I found that body image was “good to think with” during my theory courses. Around the same time, my Asian-American friends from undergrad started sending me K-Pop videos and I noticed how male idols were presenting in media. I became curious about to whether and to what extent men internalized those images versus those in the global White Western media. I found that there wasn’t much research on it, so I decided to do it myself.”

What was one of the most interesting findings?

“One of the most interesting findings was that, despite a lot of my participants saying that people don’t talk about men’s bodies (at least to the same extent that they do women’s bodies), everyone had opinions about them and everyone’s understandings of social expectations about men’s bodies and their meaning were extremely consistent.”

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

“Now that I’ve finished my dissertation I’m trying to get back into reading fiction. I’m in the middle of Moby Dick now. I used to be kind of skeptical of “queer readings” of literature, but I’m convinced that it’s the only way to read Moby Dick.”

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

“When we’re looking to address difficult phenomena like eating disorders across cultures, it’s extremely important for researchers to (1) unpack how people are really experiencing it (i.e., not just transplanting political-economically powerful white US emic perspectives elsewhere) and (2) for anthropologists to be able to articulate the barriers and disjunctures which emerge during ethnographic fieldwork in ways accessible to the actors who directly interact with people suffering from the phenomena (i.e., clinicians, public health practitioners, policymakers).”

Thank you for your time!

Other places to connect:
Website
LinkedIn
Twitter

Interview with Iben Emilie Christensen

Posted by

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

Iben Emilie Christensen is a Danish sociologist and PhD student at the Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, and at VIVE, The Danish Center for Social Science Research. She is in the final stage of her PhD project focusing on everyday life among people with severe mental and physical illnesses.

What is your article “Senses of Touch: The Absence and Presence of Touch in Health Care Encounters of Patients with Mental Illness“ about?

“Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the article explores the significance of touch and physical examination in different healthcare encounters among people with severe mental (schizophrenia, bipolar disease, and severe depression) and physical illnesses. We found that touch and physical examination of this patient group is limited in healthcare encounters leaving the patients with feelings of being misunderstood, less socially approved, and less worthy of trust. Despite patients being seen, heard and treated with care and empathy by health care professionals, it was not enough for them to feel recognized or think of the encounter as a pleasant one. Overall, the article shows that when touch and physical examination takes place in healthcare encounters it gives the patients recognition – their bodily sensations and symptoms are taken seriously and not least, they are recognized as patients and human beings, suffering from a somatic disease and not only mental disorders with psychiatric label.”

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

“The overall aim of my PhD project is to study the everyday life among people who live with both mental and physical illnesses, and to explore how they experience and navigate within the health care system. My PhD is part of a larger research project at the University of Copenhagen called SOFIA, with the primary aim to reduce the all-cause mortality of patients with severe mental illness and comorbidity in Denmark by improving the treatment of their comorbid physical conditions in general practice. The findings contribute to the SOFIA project regarding the experiences of people with severe mental and physical illnesses, their healthcare-seeking strategies, and their experiences when engaging with the healthcare system.”

What drew you to this project?

“I worked as a researcher at VIVE, The Danish Center for Social Science Research, when I was offered the opportunity to be part of the large research project SOFIA as a PhD student at the University of Copenhagen. The chance to explore a new research field, such as psychiatry, and a particular interest in inequity and inequality in healthcare motivated me to pursue this project. People with severe mental illness die 10-20 years earlier compared to people without mental illness and according to research part of this excess mortality stems from physical illnesses, which are believed to be underdiagnosed and undertreated. The ethnographic fieldwork gained important insight into the interlocutors’ everyday life, which also involved these topics.”

What was one of the most interesting findings?

“In the beginning of the PhD study, I did not anticipate that touch, particularly procedural touch (physically examination of patients), would to be the topic of the first article. However, during fieldwork and when observing the interlocutors as they interacted with different healthcare professionals, I wondered why they never seemed to find the encounter pleasant. This prompted my co-authors and I to focus on what did not take place, what did not occur and what I did not observe, leading us to realize the significance of touch in healthcare encounters.”

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

“Since my next article focuses on patients’ experiences of symptoms and the interpretative process when living with mental and physical illnesses simultaneously, I read about bodily sensations and how they transform into symptoms in an everyday life perspective.”

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

“People with severe mental illness often face vulnerability, social exposure, and stigma, and may live on the edge of society. I believe, that if a doctor’s caring hand and a physical examination during healthcare encounters give this patient group a feeling of being recognized as they are, as patients with potential somatic illness, and as human beings with same rights and possibilities, I think it is a minimal adjustment to incorporate touch as a continuous procedure in healthcare encounters.”

Thank you for your time!

Other places to connect:
Website
LinkedIn

Interview with Omnia El Shakry

Posted by

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

Omnia El Shakry is a professor of history at the University of California, Davis. Her research centers on the history of the human and religious sciences in modern Egypt.

What is your article “The Work of Illness in the Aftermath of a ‘Surpassing Disaster’: Medical Humanities in the Middle East and North Africa” about?

“The article serves as a commentary on new work in the medical humanities in the Middle East, while posing a series of questions. What happens when we question the role of the expert and the idea of the detached rationality of expertise in medicine and psychiatry? How should we account for the cultural specificity of illness and of healing practices in the Middle East, particularly in institutional contexts in which the mental hospital aspired to function as a ‘healing collective’? Given that the Middle East has been at the center of a series of catastrophic events, how can we understand the persistent inability of modern medicine to understand physical anguish, but also spiritual pain, within this context? Middle East studies is, I think, especially well situated to consider these questions, precisely because the region is an arena in which so many of the experiments of group life—both in its traumatism and its healing—model distinct ways of imagining non-materialist understandings of illness, suffering, and healing.”

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

“I am an intellectual historian interested in epistemology and ethics within the human and religious sciences. I am currently working on two projects– one is on the work of Sami-Ali, the Arabic translator of Sigmund Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, author of a large body of original psychoanalytic writings, and translator of the poetry of Sufi masters. The second is on the vibrant movement of intellectual exchange between Muslim and Catholic scholars and religious practitioners in twentieth century Egypt.”

What drew you to this project?

“I was a participant in the conference “Power in Medicine: Interrogating the Place of Medical Knowledge in the Modern Middle East,” organized by Edna Bonhomme, Lamia Moghnieh, and Shehab Ismail in Berlin in April of 2019. The piece is a commentary on the specific articles that came out of that conference and are published in CMP and on the wider issues raised by the workshop. But it is more than that, it is also partly and indirectly a reflection on my own personal experience with illness, my frustration with biomedicine, and my dear friend and colleague Stefania Pandolfo’s inspiration and encouragement to see the ‘wound light.’”

What was one of the most interesting findings?

“I was especially struck by how intellectually generative it was to juxtapose Georges Canguilhem’s observation in the Normal and the Pathological that to be a living organism is to accept “the eventuality of catastrophic reactions,” alongside Jalal Toufic’s theorization of the “withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster.””

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

“I am currently reading David Marriott’s brilliant Lacan Noir: Lacan and Afro-pessimism. I am (almost) always listening to The Mountain Goats and I watch a ton of TV, which I affectionately refer to as ‘cheap therapy,’ and have been enjoying The Peripheral and the current season of Bob’s Burgers.”

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

“That we should work toward imagining the non-West as a site for the production and critique of theoretical knowledge (or ‘theory’) within the human sciences, rather than merely a site for its consumption and circulation.”

Thank you for your time!

Other places to connect:
Website
Other

Interview with Dr. Edna Bonhomme

Posted by

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

Edna Bonhomme is a historian of science and writer based in Berlin, Germany. Edna’s research critically engages with how people navigate the unsavory and unwieldy states of health—primarily how people contend with contagious outbreaks, medical experiments, reproductive assistance, and illness narratives. Her work has appeared in Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, The Guardian, the London Review of Books and elsewhere. Edna’s forthcoming book examines contagion in confined spaces.

What is your article “Medicine and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa: Transdisciplinary Approaches in Medical Humanities” about?

“I co-edited a special issue that elucidated the intellectual and transdisciplinary approaches to medicine and psychiatry in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The journal issue is a compilation of various papers from an interdisciplinary workshop we co-organized in Berlin while I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science. The two-day workshop was held in Berlin in April 2019 and generated live interventions and debates about medicine’s connection to colonialism, humanitarianism,  and nationalism in the MENA region. This co-written introduction provides a theoretical framework for articulating the region’s specificities and some universal trends. We argue that the authors engage in broader discussions that not only frame disease, health, and healing in the Middle East and North Africa while also exploring how medical practices in the region dovetail with global trends.”

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

“I am a historian of science, culture writer, and editor who explores how people navigate the unsavory and unwieldy states of health—especially subjects that discuss contagious outbreaks, medical experiments, reproductive assistance, or illness narratives. I write cultural criticism, features, book reviews, and opinion pieces. I am especially interested in human driven narratives and to think actively about those who have been excluded from history, which often means thinking actively about a wide range of sources and archives.”

What drew you to this project? 

“In 2017, I graduated with a PhD in History of Science from Princeton University and my dissertation, “Plagued Bodies and Spaces’ ‘ examined the origins and progression of epidemics in North Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As a historian, my research examines contagion, epidemics, and toxicity by asking: what makes people sick? As a writer, I narrate how people perceive modern plagues and how they try to escape from them through critical storytelling. My writing about illness and health draws on my educational training in biology (BA), public health (MPH), and in history of science (PhD), and I invite readers to sit with the messiness of contagion, the discomforts of maladies, and the power of embodied knowledge, while also finding people’s desire to heal.”

What was one of the most interesting findings?

“Rather than look solely at illness as a given or have a universal definition of mental illness, we tried to explore how categories of disease have shifted within the Middle East and North Africa. At least at the level of merchants, goods, and materials potentially being the sites of vectors, but also being a site of control at the level of trade. These ideas and rules have evolved; they have taken on new meanings. This is primarily in the context of the age that we live in and of the rise of the nation-state, specifically, border regimes that made it even more challenging to travel between empires that were far more possible 400 years ago. How we define a disease and how we navigate trauma is also something the special issue explored.”

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

 I am drawn to creative fiction, to the power of imagination and the ways that people conjure new worlds. As such, I have been reading novels and poetry, including the works of Namwali Serpell, Sheila Heti, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Deborah Levy, Ada Limón, Claudia Rankine and more. These writers are teaching me to get lost in the page and to escape the world as we know it.

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

Most of the labor for this project was done after the workshop and during the pandemic. My collaborator and I went through a pandemic, coordinated from different time zones, and underwent major life changes. We were mourning our past lives while also holding dear to our labor and our commitment to producing scholarship about medicine, disease, and psychiatry. One thing that made this project successful is our tenacity and commitment to collective projects. As such, I highly recommend that people take the time and care to work with other researchers who not only articulate their intellectual interests but who also have a mutual work ethic.

Thank you for your time!

Other places to connect:
Website
Twitter
Substack