Paper proposals are now invited for the panel ‘Anthropology of Mental Health: At the Intersections of Transience, “Chronicity” and Recovery’, which will take place at the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (ASA) conference, at the University of Durham, 4-7 July 2016.
Responding to recent changes in psychiatric diagnoses and treatments and the growing instability of global political and economic systems, this panel calls for urgent anthropological engagement with mental illness and distress. Mental ill-health accounts for a significant proportion of the world’s health burden and causes disruption to individuals and communities. Often those afflicted are already disadvantaged and marginalised, such that structural violence and mental ill-health are entangled. By retracing the footsteps of established anthropological research into psychiatry and illness experiences, alongside a commitment to critical complexity and uncertainty, the panel will forge new pathways into understanding suffering and caregiving.
Concepts of care and recovery in both the clinic and community are contingent on notions of the temporal nature of mental illness. At its core, the panel will therefore be concerned with actual and imagined temporalities of suffering; by bridging anthropologies of medicine and time, it will problematise the taken for granted time-lines and emplotments pervasive in clinical discourses. It will interrogate boundaries between concepts of transience, so-called ‘chronicity’ and recovery as they come into focus through ethnographic analyses of lived experience in the clinic and beyond. In furthering anthropological knowledge, these explorations will contribute to broader debates, drawing anthropology into dialogue with clinical and policy frameworks and service user advocacy. In so doing, the panel seeks to envisage hopeful futures for the discipline and those it encounters.
The deadline for paper proposals is 15 February 2016. Please submit your paper proposal through the panel page online.
For informal inquiries, please contact panel convenors Anna Lavis and Karin Eli.