Adolescent Sex and Psyche in Brazil: Surveillance, Critique and Global Mental Health

Abstract

Drawing on a historical ethnography conducted in Southern Brazil, this article explores how public health programs for adolescent reproductive and mental health have emerged in Brazil and begun to intersect with the growing field of “global mental health” (GMH). The story I recount begins not in the 2010s with the rapid rise of expert interest in adolescent health within GMH, but in the 1990s, the decade when young teens in Brazil were first coming into contact with practices and approaches in research, schools and clinics that have both underpinned and critiqued the production of an adolescent mental and reproductive health sub-field. In parsing what young women’s encounters with the then newly-emerging questionnaires, measurement tools, school-based programs and clinical practices came to mean to them, I use a genealogical approach to consider how histories of education reform, population control, psychoanalysis, social medicine, the transition to democracy, feminism and grass-roots politics all entered the fold, shaping the way adolescent sex-and-psyche materialized as a contested object of expertise. I end by exploring what this case can teach global mental health advocates and social theorists about practices of critique.

The Global Psyche: Experiments in the Ethics and Politics of Mental Life

“…“Resistance” becomes the primary presumed medium of such disruption. But resistance comes with its own risks of over‐determination; it too has its own histories and contingencies that need to be taken not as a de facto position of hermeneutic superiority but a social phenomenon to be explored in its own right (Appadurai 2016; Béhague 2019; Escobar 1992; Seymour 2006). As anthropologists have engaged with this question, other more hopeful and generative ways of understanding and writing about disruptions of power have sprung up—refusal (Simpson 2014), abandonment and asocial endurance (Povinelli 2011; Wool and Livingston 2017), design (Murphy 2016), affect (Cooper 2018; Masco 2014; Stewart 2007), and becoming (Biehl and Locke 2017) are examples of aesthetics, even moods, that depart from the bifurcations that analyses of hegemony and resistance so often set up.…”

Global Mental Health: Interdisciplinary challenges for a field in motion

“…The second special issue in 2016 offered further counterpoint to the public health oriented GMH approach through ethnographic accounts highlighting the cultural specificity of mental health in context (Ecks, 2016; Jain & Orr, 2016). Efforts to harness social science insights to critique and refine GMH practice have led to important edited volumes (Kohrt & Mendenhall, 2015; White, Jain, Orr, & Read, 2017) and a thematic issue of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry (Lovell, Read & Lang, 2019) that takes the field itself as its empirical object, and analyses the history of its institutions (Henckes, 2019; Lovell, et al., 2019), its interventions as they unfold (Bemme, 2019; Kienzler, 2019; Read, 2019), and the sometimes paradoxical effects of public mental health surveillance (Béhague, 2019; Lang, 2019).…”