Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry & the Politics of Psychic Life Speaker Series
Urban mental health beyond social relationships? Encountering as a heuristic for co-laborative interdisciplinary engagements between anthropology and psychiatry
By Patrick Bieler, PhD, Postdoctoral fellow, Institute of European Ethnology, Humbold-Universität zu Berlin
ABSTRACT:
Against the backdrop of increasing worldwide urbanization, the need for interdisciplinary joint work between psychiatry and the social sciences has become ever more apparent. Psychiatric research has established a causal relationship between urban life and mental illnesses (especially schizophrenia) (Lederbogen et al. 2011; Vassos et al. 20112). This has motivated anthropologists, sociologists and human geographers to simultaneously draw on and move beyond Foucauldian inspired deconstructive critique of psychiatric institutions and knowledge production to establish modes of collaboration in which social scientists connect meaningfully to psychiatric questions while participating equally with their core competences (Bieler/Niewöhner 2018; Fitzgerald et al. 2016; Rose 2019; Söderström et al. 2016). In this presentation, I will substantiate these methodological developments with anthropological concept work to establish the conditions for a productive engagement between the disciplines.
Psychiatry is increasingly interested in how urban environments ‘get under the skin’ (Galea/Link 2011; Winz 2018), thereby going beyond a strict biomedical focus on individual biology and lifestyle. Yet, contrasted with theoretical reflections in anthropology, the variable-based approach is characterized by a distinction between humans and environmental ‘factors’, and a focus on ‘the social’ (Manning 2019), understood as broad social processes that shape and are mediated by mostly meaningful, tight-knit social relations between humans. Neither simply discarding nor reifying these findings, I take them as starting points to unpack questions that have been so far unanswered: How is ‘the urban’ constituted in practice, how important are seemingly ‘absent’ social contacts, how do humans embody emergent environments in everyday life, and which more-than human aspects are central to these processes?
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with mental health care clients and providers in Berlin, Germany, I have introduced and refined the notion of the encounter as an analytic that sensitizes the research focus to everyday activities, fleeting relations, ephemeral moments and intangible atmospheric conditions in and of urban life (Bieler 2021). This concept work does not simply aim at filling psychiatric blind spots with ethnographic means, however, but pose more fundamental questions regarding the ontology of mental health and the city as well as the relations between nature and culture, the ’biological’ and ‘the social’, human and environment. These imply consequences not only for psychiatric research, but also demand shifts within ethnographic practice and anthropological reasoning.
Currently, I am translating these sensitivities into a more systematically structured, coherent research design in the co-laborative research project “Mind the City!”. In the remainder of the presentation, I will present the basic ideas of the design, discuss preliminary research findings from a first round of interviews and reflect on the possible routes future research in the domain of urban mental health might take as well as what challenges need to be further addressed.
BIO:
Patrick Bieler is a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute of European Ethnology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he has recently defended his PhD thesis. Currently, he is conducting research in one Berlin neighborhood as part of the co-laborative research project “Mind the City!” (funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – 427092996). His main interests are Social Anthropology of Science and Technology, Medical Anthropology, Urban Anthropology and Human-Environment Relations.