Paper short abstract:

The paper reflects upon the negotiated contribution of critical anthropologists to the Slovenian mental health literacy programme, which was designed, implemented and evaluated by a multidisciplinary team between 2017 and 2019.

Paper long abstract:

The paper discusses the efforts of a multidisciplinary team of core researchers from psychology, psychiatry and anthropology in designing, implementing and evaluating the programme With Raised Mental Health Literacy to Better Managing Mood Disorders (OMRA). The programme OMRA, which consists of several activities and involved parties, was conducted in Slovenia between October 2017 and June 2019. Despite initial expectations of an easy distribution of disciplinary tasks among the OMRA creators, some fields of disagreement emerged between anthropologists on the one hand, and both a psychologist and a psychiatrist on the other hand. The author focuses on the questions of how these discrepancies were met in order to fulfil the OMRA aims, and under what circumstances one can remain a critical anthropologist in such a multidisciplinary team, which followed as well the expectations of the funder - the Ministry of Health. Considering the necessary conditions for a fruitful multidisciplinary endeavour while not merely paying lip service, the author reflects upon the analysis of the qualitative part of the OMRA evaluation, which consists of the pre-OMRA pilot one group and 11 personal interviews with research participants, regular observations through ethnographic diaries of all 22 five-hour-long mobile workshops with 956 participants, and the post-OMRA evaluation two group and 20 personal interviews with the research participants.