Mental Health

Abstract

When we talk about mental health, we could seem to be talking about some self-evident reality. However, the very notion of mental health can be seen to both assume and require a specific vision of human interiority. The so-called ‘sciences of the soul’—or the ‘psy' disciplines—were particularly formative in defining this perceived interior selfhood through various scientific and therapeutic practices of inspection and introspection, through new constitutions, articulations, and regulations of what it means to be human. Mental health could be seen to be fundamental to our collective and individual ability as humans to think, feel, relate, interact with each other, sustain ourselves, and enjoy life. This entry explores some key theoretical and ethnographic interests, and their alignments and tensions, through which different anthropologies of mental health have taken shape. For example, social studies of mental health have been shaped by various engagements of ‘culture’ as a form of both contextualisation and critique. More recently, scholars have examined the political, ethical, and therapeutic processes by which people come to constitute themselves and others—for instance, through everyday practices of self-care or clinical diagnosis and treatment—as particular subjects of mental health. Anthropologists have described how people’s experiences of mental health and its associated afflictions are constituted relationally, in different ways, and with different social consequences around the world. The entry ends with a brief discussion of some current topics in anthropological studies of mental health, from the proliferation of mental disorders and the prevalence of neurobiological understandings of human distress to the increasing digitalisation of mental health. As these and other efforts imply, mental health is becoming a prominent field of enquiry in contemporary anthropology and one with renewed ethnographic salience for everyone involved.