Courses

This seminar takes mental health and illness in socialist and postsocialist countries as objects of anthropological investigation. It explores the ways in which mental health care, diagnostics, suffering, and therapeutic systems are constituted by and constitutive of the post/socialist cultural, political, and socioeconomic contexts. Topics include critical approaches to psychiatric diagnostics; the development of the Soviet psychiatric complex, neuropharmaceuticals, and addiction treatment practice; the constitution and treatment of mental disabilities; institutional and communal mental healthcare; deinstitutionalization; experimental treatments; healing and injurious socioeconomic and political forces; social abandonment and death. Class readings will present a mixture of theoretical texts and ethnographic/historical material from post/socialist regions.