Psychedelic medicine is a rapidly growing, billion-dollar industry poised to transform mental health care by incorporating spiritual experiences into clinical psychiatry. However, while the blending of psychiatry and mystical experience has long made this field unique, the blurred boundaries between science and spiritual practice have sparked increasing public debate. What does...
Cross-sector interventions are increasingly suggested in care for trauma-affected refugees, but knowledge about how they influence mental health over time remains sparse. Using a qualitative longitudinal design, we explored patterns of mental health change and aspects contributing to change among refugees participating in a cross-sector intervention addressing post-migration...
The mixed-methods study aimed to explore revenge fantasies among Indians, focusing on gender and religious differences, and to evaluate the alignment between quantitative measures and qualitative expressions through drawings and narratives. The sample comprised 97 Indian women and 55 men, aged 18–56, who identified as either Hindu or Christian. Quantitative assessments included...
Self-harm amongst young people has risen significantly in recent years, yet existing models fail to fully explain its underlying mechanisms. This paper applies René Girard’s theory of mimetic rivalry and escalation to self-harm, proposing that competition for social status and identity within peer groups and families may contribute to its development. In this framework, self-harm...
The Tukdam Project directed by affective neuroscientist Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 2013 has investigated Buddhist practitioners in India entering a Tibetan Buddhist post-death meditative state called tukdam (Tib., thugs dam), where the body demonstrates attenuated decomposition and presents an altered postmortem chronology process. Through a...
Mental health care is a vibrant part of child protective services in Japan, and the adoption and utilization of psychotherapeutic techniques from abroad mark a complex site of cross-cultural exchanges. This paper explores how art therapy has been brought into Japan’s protection system and its implications for professional practice. Focusing on clinical psychologist Yuri and her...
Although tukdam—a meditative state entered through various practices resting in extremely subtle consciousness while dying—is seen to only be achieved by adept practitioners, the philosophy and psychology that underpin tukdam inform Tibetan communities beyond just accomplished adepts and frame the very way death and dying is conceived. Based on an 18-month ethnographic study...
Caring well for people with profound intellectual disabilities is challenging. This challenge is often framed in terms of their complex needs and the ambiguity of interpreting these needs. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article argues that behind these challenges lies a more fundamental challenge of doubt: doubt stemming from uncertainties about the mind of the other, and...
Myanmar has experienced decades of military dictatorship, civil wars, religious violence, economic crises, and natural disasters. While these conditions would suggest very high rates of depression and anxiety, government statistics report an exceptionally low depression rate of 0.00006%, compared to the global rate of 3.4%. This study combines analysis of epidemiological data...
This paper examines the embodied aesthetic experiences of late-blind individuals during tactile engagements with Enrico Castellani’s Pseudo-Braille Surface artwork. The study applies a mixed computational-qualitative approach, utilizing the Atlas-Ti software for semantic analysis of interviews with 21 participants. Categories emerging from the analysis suggest a vivid...
The metanarrative of biomedicine and “psy” discipline (psychology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry etc.) asserts that cannabis use is one of the fundamental causes of mental illness among different men in the Rushinga district of Zimbabwe. These metanarratives, however, appear to have universalised, medicalised and marginalised the conception and representation of mental illness as...
A teaching theatre in a local psychiatric hospital was transformed into an ex-patient’s Theatre of Dreams for over two decades as he hosted weekly events that welcomed patients from the wards, ex-patients and the general public to become an audience together. Movie Monday was a unique and innovative free weekly media arts programme that would become a valued community-arts...
The series of papers in this special issue, “Ethnography of and in Clinical Formation: Poetics and Politics of Dual Subjectivity,” touch on several themes that are at the core of social medicine: the web of social structures and power relations that organize the risk and prematurity of disease and death, who gets care when and where, and what that care looks like and does within...
Understanding how bodies come to matter in eating disorder recovery is complex, particularly given the unresolved question of whether eating disorders are fundamentally about the body. Drawing on Analu Verbin’s adaptation of Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and Sarah Ahmed’s body phenomenology, this paper examines how participants in a narrative and systemic group therapy...
Low accessibility to mainstream psychosocial services disadvantages culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) populations, resulting in delayed care and high rates of unsupported psychological distress. Non-clinical interventions may play an important role in improving accessibility to psychosocial support, but what characterises best practice in this space remains unclear...
Amid patriarchal conditions that render one son necessary and multiple daughters burdensome, selective abortion of female fetuses has become pervasive in India. Public responses often cast sex selection as self-evidently ignorant, cruel, and misogynistic – an obvious evil meriting denunciation and eradication. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Gujarat state, this article zooms...
Whilst chatbots for mental health are becoming increasingly prevalent, research on user experiences and expectations is relatively scarce and also equivocal on their acceptability and utility. This paper asks how people formulate their understandings of what might be appropriate in this space. We draw on data from a group of non-users who have experienced a need for support, and...
Emerging consensus among enactivist philosophers and embodied mind theorists suggests that seeking to understand mental illness we need to look out of our skulls at the ecology of the brain. Still, the complex links between materiality (in broadest sense of material objects, habits, practices and environments) and mental health remain little understood. This paper discusses the...
Uptake of pre-exposure prophylaxis medication (PrEP) to prevent HIV among people who inject drugs (PWID) remains extremely low in the United States. West Virginia’s rising HIV incidence and highest drug overdose rate in the nation makes it an important locus for opioid use and HIV risk interaction. In this pilot study we pioneered the use of Cultural Theory among PWID to...
Infertility, to those who are affected by it, is much more than whether one manages (or not) to have a child: it can be a traumatizing experience. Based on a clinical case study that involved one-to-one psychotherapy sessions and semi-structured interviews with six involuntarily childless women living in Norway, this article develops the argument that there is a need to treat...
The human capacity for symbolic representation arises, evolutionarily and developmentally, from the exploitation of a widespread sensorimotor network, along a fundamental continuity between embodied and symbolic modes of experience. In this regard, the fine balancing between constrained sensorimotor connections (responsible for self-embodiment processing) and more untethered...