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

Abstract

Across hemispheres, nations, and domains of social life, the language of psychiatry and mental health constitutes an increasingly universal frame for suffering while also expressing a human condition ever more liberated from and ever more alienated by medical knowledge. The use of psychiatric labels and discourses as tools of governance in the face of violence and disorder and as means of grievance and redress for social and political movements are not particularly new. But the present moment presents a particular density, ubiquity, and fluidity to both of these deployments. The affective dimensions of large-scale political projects, from humanitarianism to environmentalism, electoral processes to ever-expanding (self-) surveillance practices, rest on objectifying interior states and generating master narratives of collective stress (Masco 2017). Psychiatric symptoms and diagnostic categories become sites of threat, governance, care, resistance, mobilization, and knowledge creation in domains ranging from health care access, borders and immigration, police violence, nuclear conflict, and control and funding of scientific research to white nationalism, post-industrial precariousness, neoliberal managerialism, hate crime, and liberal apocalypticism. In the process, conceptions of mental life become sites of moral and political reckoning and ethical speculation and reconfiguration, birthing novel experiments in justice, rights, survival, personhood, and the good life.The aim of this collection is to examine diverse incarnations of what might be called the global psyche. We combine these two over-general terms advisedly, with an eye to the multitudinous labors by which worldwide aspirations are produced or disavowed, an attention to the limits and possibilities of conceiving the psyche and the globe as stable points of reference, and an awareness of the novel forcespolitical, technological, neurobiological, ecological-that outpace and disrupt abiding interpretive frames. As anthropologists of the experience, objectification, regulation, and problematization of psychic life, we are committed to conversations-like those under the ambit of global mental health-about how practice and policy can best be calibrated to harmful forms of psychological distress confronting some

From Person to Life: An Anthropological Examination of Primary Health Care Approach to Depression in Rio de Janeiro

“…Even amid these adversities, professionals in our research deployed alternatives, striving to offer a form of mental health care that engaged with life. Our investigation reflects what Béhague and MacLeish (2020), drawing on the work of Sedgwick (2003), call "reparative ethnographies." Building on Melanie Klein's psychoanalytic theory, Sedgwick defined as "reparative" a "position" that can "repair" or "assemble" painful psychic experiences "into a whole," finding paths to provide "nourishment" and "comfort" through one's own pain (Sedgwick 2003: 128).…”

Contingent universality: The epistemic politics of global mental health

“…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).…”

Pandemic paranoia: Toward a reparative practice of the global psyche

“…Pursuing an affective analysis of the present global psyche (Béhague and MacLeish, 2020 ) means that the sense of paranoia in crisis should not be reduced to an unrealistic individual account of delusion or a cultural conspiracy that victim-blames a targeted group. From the psychoanalytic traditions, both Freud and Kristeva remind us that the psyche is a discursive product and is embedded within socio-historical developments (see Elliott, 1992 ).…”

“…This perspective on power as a form of relationality makes possible such a middle space between omnipotence and helplessness. The shift away from an individualistic clinical account of the psyche toward the framework of the global psyche allows us to see how power unfolds via the complex webs of relations surrounding geopolitical competition, the medical industrial complex, and the racialization of the virus, rather than simply reproducing paranoid discourses of crisis (Béhague and MacLeish, 2020 ).…”

“…I first highlight how the clinical and mainstream scientific approach that seeks to eliminate paranoia is incapable of addressing the defensive need of the wounded psyche, and secondly I draw attention to the limits of critical theory based on paranoid affect that has relied on a political vision of negativity via critique. This article further dispenses with the individualistic, clinical approach to paranoia in psychology in order to move toward an affective analysis of the ''global psyche'' (Béhague and MacLeish, 2020) that takes the world as a focal point of reference and an interpretative frame. From the scale of the virus to cross-national geopolitical conflict, I not only examine how paranoia accumulates and circulates across groups, producing racialized splits in the global psyche, but also highlight the critical possibilities of engaging in a reparative practice of paranoid knowledge production that welcomes surprises, engages with multiplicity, and aspires toward transformative action (Felski, 2012;Sedgwick, 2003;Wiegman, 2014).…”