For this panel, I intend to present the preliminary reflections of my fieldwork carried out between 2022-2023 in New York City, where I had the opportunity to interview graduate students from four major universities in the Manhattan region, seeking to understand how graduate students with problems of mental health reconcile the suffering/illness of their lives with the academic activities they carry out. I intend to address this issue by analyzing how students from the global South, residing in New York, experience belonging to a global academic elite, taking into account: the prestige and value of the institutions where they work, in the way they experience different fields of knowledge, on how precariousness of working conditions overwhelm graduate students mental health, and how the academic world can be understood as a location of psychic suffering and cosmopolitanism.
Based on semi-structured interviews, participant observation and self-ethnography, I intend to problematize the relationship between mental illness and the biomedical model, analyzing the consumption of psychotropic drugs and other drugs, the effectiveness of psi therapeutic models, engagement with self-care practices and the subjective effects of COVID-19. Among the issues involved in academic mental health, the themes of competitiveness, individualism and loneliness are central, referring to a broader phenomenon in the globalized world we live in, where the dualistic tensions between body and mind contribute to a greater understanding of the human experience with mental health and social suffering.
