Research themes and subprojects
Currently, some of the Covid-19 mental health research from different national contexts is becoming available in several partial databases, but only if it is published in English-language journals.
However, this project will explore (and make available) a much more comprehensive range of the emerging mental health literature both in English and in the native languages of the seven case study countries (see below), and will extend the source base significantly beyond psychiatric literature to include anthropological and psychosocial research as well as published mental health narratives of Covid-19 survivors and other ‘lay persons’ who are experiencing the pandemic and its consequences.
In addition to analysing a much broader variety of mental health literature, we will engage with the universalist discourse about mental health, and explore critically the methodology used in the existing psy studies as well as the assumed universality of their diagnostic concepts. What questionnaires and surveys are being developed and delivered? How are they translated into different languages and is there a consideration for possible socio-cultural differences included in these translations? Are there any culture-specific surveys and instruments at all? An array of new Covid-specific research instruments and scales are now emerging - most of them produced in the global North and exported elsewhere. These new research instruments ought to receive more critical examination from cross-cultural medical humanities. The project asks how they are developed and tested, and by whom, and how they are translate and applied by clinicians in different cultural settings.
The project will explore the narratives and experiences of Covid-19 in different parts of the world:
Subprojects
This study will investigate how vulnerable communities of Latin American Cities have experienced the pandemic of the COVID-19. The study will focus on how the contingencies derived from the spread of the virus, the forms of management of the pandemic and the sociocultural contexts were perceived and handled in terms of mental health problems. The study will be undertaken in two of the region's largest cities, São Paulo, in Brazil, and Bogotá, in Colombia. In São Paulo, the study will focus on the results of participatory-action research that explored how subjective experiences were perceived and cared for in a community situated on the outskirts of the city, in a neighbourhood marked by strong socioeconomic adversities and a long history of social mobilization. In Colombia, an ethnographic inquiry will investigate how members of a community in the periphery of Bogotá, inhabited by many displaced persons who moved from rural to urban areas due to violent conflict in the countryside, have perceived, conceptualized and handled the mental health impacts posed by the pandemic. On the one hand, the project will explore psychological experiences lived by persons facing extreme circumstances of adversity and distress. On the other hand, it will also problematize the framing of these experiences through the universalistic narratives offered by ‘psy disciplines’ that frequently focus on the universality of psychological problems and mental health outcomes at individual and subjective levels.
This project will explore the emergent Covid-19 mental health literature and public discourses, medical and lay narratives of Covid-related mental illness and healing in Russia, scrutinizing how the Russian population experiences the pandemic/lockdown psychologically and emotionally: ‘What is highlighted and diagnosed (or self-diagnosed) as the core problem and illness/suffering?’ ‘Who does communication?’ ‘What methods, concepts, metaphors, and emotional words are used?’ The overall aim is to understand how practitioners and lay participants lived experiences of the pandemic and of ‘being in the pandemic’ and psychological reactions and social responses to mental illness are connected to local knowledge, histories, ideologies, ways of thinking, feeling, doing, speaking and learning, and how it is worked into the psychiatric research and practice in Russia. The project is particularly interested in emotions and in ways emotional histories and norms assign values to, express and suppress emotions and suffering.
This project will not only examine how the discourses on the pandemic’s impact on mental health are produced in China’s institutionalized settings, but also how they are received, absorbed, transformed, and contested by grassroot mental health promoters and the recipients of their services. Given the continuous existence of stigma surrounding mental illnesses in China, many sufferers turn to the country’s vibrant and loosely regulated self-help and counselling milieu in search of support and alleviation of their emotional burdens through practices that incorporate psychological theories treatments, as well as inspirations from Traditional Chinese Medicine or folk religion. Examining the discourses related to the experiences of social isolation and economic crisis that are circulated in these de-institutionalized settings can shed a light on people’s lived experiences of mental illnesses and their efforts geared at community-building. It can also illuminate the government’s attempts to control the official narrative on the impact of the pandemic on mental health, as the local popular psychology networks exist in the grey area between legitimacy and illegality.
This project focuses on south Asian people, places, institutions, healing sites & cultures, communities, ideas and mental health approaches in a critical way in order to explore the diverse health social realities in the region from transdisciplinary perspectives, ranging from health science methods, critical discourse analysis to engaged ethnographic research. By dividing the research into two distinct (but not antithetical) spheres, medical institutions (and spaces), and non-clinical contexts, the project explores the intersectional nature and plural realities of mental health and wellbeing in the region, against the background of the Covid-19 pandemic. The project aims to explore mental health scenarios in South Asia under two broad sub-themes: a) to look at mental health from a restrictive sense, i.e., across diverse mental health institutions and spaces (including, but not limited to, psychiatrists, psychologists, medical doctors, folk and religious-social community practices, traditional healers etc.); and b) to look at emotional-spiritual health and well-being across diverse social solidarity attempts and vulnerable groups.
This project aims to explore whether mental health can be described as universal in the context of COVID-19 considering the socio-cultural factors associated with the pandemic in West Africa, specifically Nigeria and Ghana. To achieve this aim, the study will explore the medical, psychiatric and anthropological literature on COVID-19 and mental health in Nigeria and Ghana, engage with patients’ psychological experiences of the pandemic, and highlight how socio-cultural, economic and political factors shaped specific psychological conditions and diagnoses. Moreover, the project aims to determine which psychological conditions have been emphasised and diagnosed (or self-diagnosed) in different socio-cultural settings and why, and to analyse critically the methodology, research instruments and diagnostic concepts used in the existing mental health studies in Ghanaian and Nigerian literature. The outcome of this project will not only add to the literature on cultural psychiatry and its global applications but also contribute to the broader debate regarding the nature and viability of global mental health.