This panel is guided by three main perspectives: position, institutions, and action. By positions, we understand this as an area where critical feminist anthropology is relevant (Ortner, 1972), as we can see by the so-called "standpoint theory” (Alenn, 2017), encompassing gender, sexuality, body, and emotions (Das, 1996), including questions regarding psychiatric taxonomy, whether the classification of mental health problems is universal or culturally relative, but also its effects on people at margins of culture and society, where different knowledge are situated (Haraway, 1988) and mobilized in (g)local contexts of tension between North and South.
Institutions reflect on the structural sources of human distress and suffering, specifically the impact of the State regarding treatment systems and interventions, the role of institutions and therapies in shaping the social experience of mental illness, and the recognition of mental health as a problem of a politico-economic nature, where the State can be simultaneously provoking ambiguous forms of violence, control or care (Fassin, 2009; Mbembe, 2017) under the influence of contemporary capitalism, producing asylums, psychiatric emergency rooms, therapeutic communities, but also institutionalizing biomedical and technology inequalities, producing different kinds of global ethics and fluxes of psychotropic drugs (Halliburton, 2020), knowledge on the nature of brains and mental health (Dumit, 2003; Rose and Abi-Rached, 2013), and how modernity and tradition cut across different cultures on the individuals' understanding of mental health.
Finally, the theme of action proposes to engage creative alternatives for theory and methodology in anthropological approaches, changing roles of anthropologists, case studies, ways in which we think/act in contexts of social movements, community mobilizations, self-care practices, and new understandings about mental health in the face of theoretical ideas of our time, such as the production of Stigmas (Goffman, 1986), embodiment (Csordas, 1990) or the enactment (Mol, 2002) of our bodies and minds.
