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- Convenors:
-
Junko Kitanaka
(Keio University)
Amy Borovoy (Princeton University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 6 April, -
Time zone: America/Chicago
Short Abstract:
By examining the rise of community psychiatry and alternative therapies for mental health, this panel seeks to explore what ideas of mental illness, personhood, and environment these practices help advance, and how they may be transforming the way people envision psychological health.
Long Abstract:
As the era of mental hospitals is closing in for most parts of the world, many societies are witnessing a rise of community psychiatry and alternative therapies for mental health. Despite the prevailing concern that the forces of global mental health might homogenize psychiatric care via a biomedical model, these areas have instead seen flourishing therapeutic cultures that range from various forms of self-help group, "self-study" programs for those who want to do research on their mental health, meditation practices, as well as art and talk therapies that constitute vibrant therapeutic landscapes in urban centers. While some of these remain within a more commercialized domain, alongside established psychiatric institutions, others, such as self-study groups have begun to formally challenge the received knowledge of psychiatry, instead asserting their own ideas about the causes of mental illness and recovery. We investigate these new practices in the context of a radical rethinking of social and environmental issues, emblemized by an interest in "user-controlled research" and "coproduction" of health and mental health services. We also illuminate growing trends to see mental health care as a social welfare problem, to remove distinctions between professionals and recipients, and to rethink these services as "doing for" rather than "doing to." By mapping out the emerging therapeutic cultures with one focus on East Asia but not limited to it, this panel seeks to investigate what ideas of mental illness, personhood, and environment these practices help advance, and how they may be transforming the way people envision psychological health.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 6 April, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper traces the rise of "active listening" as a form of community-based grassroots psychosocial therapy. Against the backdrop of aging residents and increased attention to mental health needs, keichō aims to empower individuals by transcending distinctions between caregiver and care-receiver.
Paper long abstract:
Over the past 30 years, there has been a steady increase in volunteer groups in Japan that provide a service called keichō, or “active listening.” This involves a specific mode of listening whereby the volunteer becomes an empathetic listening partner for an interlocutor to speak freely about their thoughts or concerns. Keichō originally comes from American psychotherapy, and was localized and made available for non-specialists in Japan through keichō training seminars since the 1990s. Today, volunteers have since expanded their activities to include elderly care homes, schools, prisons, and post-disaster situations. Some estimate that between 330,000 to one million people have had keichō volunteer experience in Japan. Based on longitudinal fieldwork and interviews with keichō trainers, volunteers, and recipients, this paper examines the emergence of this keichō volunteer movement and how it is situated within contemporary notions of mental health, psychological care, and social welfare in Japan. I argue that this form of “grassroots psychosocial therapy” emerges as an alternative mode and meaning of mental healthcare and an egalitarian model of social welfare, which is characterized by “average citizens” offering community-based psychosocial care to other “average citizens.” Moreover, rather than part of a neoliberalization of welfare in Japan, I suggest that the growing popularity of keichō volunteer movements reveals both an increased attention to mental health needs among the general populace, as well as an increased interest among aging residents in providing care for one’s own community in a way that transcends conventional distinctions between caregiver and care-receiver.
Paper short abstract:
How does a childhood marked by displacement reshape and press into the psychotherapeutic imaginary of the 'inner child'? To answer this question, this paper draws on 6 months of preliminary fieldwork at the Lod Theatre, a psychodrama center located in a low-income, migrant neighborhood in Israel.
Paper long abstract:
Since the 1980s, psychodrama has proliferated as Israeli psychiatry’s response to unremarked social ills (e.g. poverty, legal discrimination). Psychodrama is an expressive mode of psychotherapy that invokes role-play games to rework the subject’s relationship to herself and others. To this end, psychodrama aims to channel the spontaneity of children’s play in order to reframe suffering within “dramatic reality,” where dreams and fantasies gain tangible expression on stage (Pendzik 2006). Classical psychodrama theorists paint both concrete children and the figure of the inner-child as plastic, spontaneous, and ungoverned by social norms (Moreno 1946; Nolte 2014). This paper draws from six months of preliminary fieldwork at the Lod Theatre Center, a psychodrama center in a low-income, diverse, migrant neighborhood. It synthesizes material from the clinical archives with the author’s ethnographic research on the center’s therapeutic theatre production Tlushim (Torn); a play grappling with the inter-generational legacy of Lod’s mass transit camps. These camps interned Arab-Jews and Holocaust survivors during the 1950s. This paper asks, how do patient and clinician experiences with war, displacement, and ethno-nationalism reshape and press into the psychodramatic formulation of the inner-child and theories of selfhood and child development? This paper suggests that ethnographic attention to the voice of the child in the play Tlushim allows us to track how clinical experimentation with dramaturgy reshapes a biomedical model of healing. Moreover, the paper suggests that close attention to these aesthetic renderings of childhood complicates a universalist therapeutic imaginary of the inner-child.
Paper short abstract:
Marginalized artists in Singapore, while living with the stigma of queerness and/or mental illness, build political coalitions out of the affective—and opaque—material of their lives. This paper investigates how inequalities are expressed and experienced creatively and ethically in the everyday.
Paper long abstract:
In Singapore, there is a sense of anonymity, loss, exclusion and rupture associated with being queer and mentally ill. Artists, while living with the stigma of queerness and mental illness, build political coalitions out of the affective—and opaque—material of their lives. Queer art creates a space for transgressive world-making where expressions of urban marginality are allowed but under certain socio-legal regimes. As with queerness, there is a hide-and-seek theme in the storytelling of depression. To avoid hypervisibility and stigma, many marginalized artists engage in a dialectic of opacity and express this thought: I want to be seen but I also don’t want to expose myself. This is a new language that is (1) in line with their ways of dealing with everyday policing; and (2) a clear discourse of the field site itself. How might queer world-making in the arts look like? How is the work of art healing? My paper argues that world-making through queer art is (1) a form of storytelling; and (2) a means of plugging holes, of harnessing the potentiality to remake one’s society. World-making can be seen as a pleasurable act as it is the vicissitude of the many effects of modernity where one does not have a transcendent such as the welfare state and/or wherein one lives in a democracy under jeopardy. The pleasures of world-making occur and are experienced in an event when one tries to ascertain a kind of ethics in the world that does not provide it.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on an ethnographic research on a peer-led mental health support group in Japan, this paper investigates how peer-staff facing difficulties in sharing feelings of empathy have discovered the paradoxical power of failed empathy and established disconnection as a basis for a new connection.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on three years of ethnographic research on a peer-led mental health support group in Japan named YPS (Yokohama Peer Staff association), this paper investigates why some peer-staff face difficulties in sharing feelings of empathy towards others with mental illness and how they have dealt with it. YPS has become prominent in the peer-support movement in Japan by providing other organizations with its knowledge of how to work with peer-staff. While many workplaces in the mental health sector presume that peer-staff can deeply empathize with other people’s sufferings based on their own lived experience, YPS believes that their true power does not lie in empathy. Many peer-staff members I have interviewed point out the difficulty of genuinely empathizing with users as they often find each person’s experience so different from their own that it precludes easy understanding. To avoid these failures of empathy, some peer-staff have imitated the “professional empathy” they have found in social workers. In so doing, they become what other members call “elite peers,” who acquire moral authority and rise to the top of the peer-hierarchy. However, most peer-staff members have failed and/or refuse to adapt to the social-worker-type of empathy and become what they self-disparagingly call “stray peers.” Over the years, stray peers have cultivated a unique understanding of their inability to empathize and the despair such disconnection can often bring. This paper examines how these stray peers have discovered the paradoxical power of failed empathy and established disconnection as a basis for a new connection.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the new identities that are merging in China's mental health field, focusing on how they are shaped by the circulation of global activisms, the country's ongoing welfare reconstruction, and the strategic alliances built by/with various stakeholders.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years, new identities have emerged for psychiatric "patients" in China, such as "users," "survivors, and "peers." This paper shows that these identities have emerged with the circulation of global activisms, the country's ongoing welfare reconstruction, and the strategic alliances built by/with various stakeholders. In particular, they are responses to the dominance of institutionalization in the country's mental healthcare for people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses, as well as to the rise of community mental health in the country that is still very much expert-driven and biomedically oriented. These identities allow people to resist medical oppressions and to assert their voices in institutional and community mental health policies, but they might also trivialize and misrepresent people's lived experiences. Since anthropologists are often entangled in the production of these identities, we should be reflexive of the contexts that shape and are shaped by them, conscious of our own roles in the process, but also open to appreciating the slow, uneven, and unexpected changes that these new identities might bring.