Leveraging anthropological expertise to respond to the COVID‐19 global mental health syndemic

Azevedo, Kathryn; Kalvesmaki, Andrea; Riendeau, Rachel P.; Sweet, Philip A.; Holmes, Seth M.

doi:10.1111/aman.13747

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…Since the early GMH debate, the critics too, found and created new spaces for engagement with the premises of the field. They developed socioculturally inflected GMH programmes 3 and imagined 'more than critique' approaches for anthropology and transcultural psychiatry (Azevedo et al, 2022;Kohrt & Mendenhall, 2016;Vorhölter, 2022), anthropological explorations of the genealogies and making of the 'global psyche' (Béhague & MacLeish, 2020;Lovell et al, 2019), and a thicker engagement with the histories of global psychiatry. The latter has brought into view how debates over the universality or specificity of mental health have played out before and as part of the projects of colonial oppression, racialized science, WHO's pacifist postwar politics, postcolonial nation-building projects, and today's decolonization efforts (Antic , 2021;Heaton, 2013;Lovell, 2014;Lovell et al, 2023;Mills, 2023;Wu, 2015).…”

Section: Making Middle-groundsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contingent universality: The epistemic politics of global mental health

Bemme

2023

Transcult Psychiatry

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The field of global mental health (GMH) has undergone profound changes over the past decade. Outgrowing its earlier agenda it has performed a reflexive turn, broadened towards a social paradigm and developed new modes of knowledge production, all of which reshaped ‘mental health’ as a global object of knowledge and care, and the epistemic politics of the field. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among GMH experts and recent agenda-setting publications, I discuss how GMH advocates and critical observers alike have created conceptual and practical middle-grounds between different forms of mental health knowledge – across culture, epistemic power, lived experience, policy platforms and academic disciplines – framing their dynamic encounters as dialogue, adaptation, participation, co-production or integration. Ultimately, I argue, GMH today is focusing less on establishing mental health as a universal problem than on managing its inherent multiplicity through alignment and integration across different bodies of knowledge. Global knowledge, so conceived, is fluid and malleable and produced in open-ended knowledge practices, governed by what I call ‘contingent universality’. It is not new that the concepts and practices of the psy-disciplines are malleable and multiple, internally and externally contested, rapidly changing over time and not easily transferrable across space. What is new is that within the increasingly heterogenous epistemic space of GMH, these features have become assets rather than liabilities. GMH knowledge achieves both global reach and local relevance precisely because ‘mental health’ can be many things; it can be expressed in a wide range of idioms and concepts, and its problems and solutions align easily with others, at many scales. These fluid and integrative knowledge practices call for renewed empirical, critical and collaborative engagement.

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Section: Making Middle-groundsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contingent universality: The epistemic politics of global mental health

Bemme

2023

Transcult Psychiatry

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“…From a clinical perspective, this form of trauma entails the posttraumatic disorders at the group level caused by societal violence, abuse, or genocide. From a socio-psychological approach, social trauma is centered around long-term social interaction and processes (Bjornsson et al, 2020 ), such as rejection, neglect, and humiliation, that may represent a social threat to the family, the group, or the inter-group level. We conceptualize social trauma as the result of long-term social abuses and a threat to sense of belonging.…”

Section: A “Continuum Of Trauma” and Its Effects In Communities Of Colormentioning

confidence: 99%

Continuum of Trauma: Fear and Mistrust of Institutions in Communities of Color During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Vázquez,

Juturu,

Burroughs

et al. 2023

Cult Med Psychiatry

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Historical, cultural, and social trauma, along with social determinants of health (SDOH), shape health outcomes, attitudes toward medicine, government, and health behaviors among communities of color in the United States (U.S.). This study explores how trauma and fear influence COVID-19 testing and vaccination among Black/African American, Latinx/Indigenous Latin American, and Native American/Indigenous communities. Leveraging community-based participatory research methods, we conducted 11 virtual focus groups from January to March of 2021 with Black/African American (n = 4), Latinx/Indigenous Latin American (n = 4), and Native American/Indigenous (n = 3) identifying community members in Inland Southern California. Our team employed rapid analytic approaches (e.g., template and matrix analysis) to summarize data and identify themes across focus groups and used theories of intersectionality and trauma to meaningfully interpret study findings. Historical, cultural, and social trauma induce fear and mistrust in public health and medical institutions influencing COVID-19 testing and vaccination decisions in communities of color in Inland Southern California. This work showcases the need for culturally and structurally sensitive community-based health interventions that attend to the historical, cultural, and social traumas unique to racial/ethnic minority populations in the U.S. that underlie fear and mistrust of medical, scientific, and governmental institutions.

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