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Your Fellowship project will be a book that explores the colonial origins of global mental health. You are a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston as well as a writer, how did you decide to take on this topic in a book?

I spent a decade doing traditional global mental health research and kept coming up against the many ways the systems and institutions within which I was working failed the very patients I purported to be helping. All along, I felt this tension but didn’t have the language to name it. This book is an effort to at least name and perhaps resolve some of that tension. I had to read and learn outside of public health literature to develop the frameworks that allow me to address the political nature of mental wellbeing—and I keep learning with every sentence I write.

Western psychiatry is traditionally individualistic. How does this translate in non-Western contexts? Do you see this individualistic approach as appropriate for treatment on a global scale?

Mainstream, Western psychology tends to emphasize individualized approaches to wellbeing. Cognitive behavioral therapy, for example, helps you turn inward and challenge your maladaptive thinking patterns. But when mental distress is derived from poverty, violence, hunger, and other structural causes, telling a patient that their experience is in their head elides their material reality. It’s a form of gaslighting.

Individualized approaches to wellbeing, then, while potentially useful in the short term, are merely band aids for structural violence perpetrated by colonialism and racial capitalism.
What do you do to prioritize your own mental health when working in the field or on long term projects?

I try not to be too hard on myself. To not give into the capitalist urge to always be producing. I keep reminding myself that these big projects are about having meaningful experiences, gestating ideas, and sharing knowledge. And so I try to make social life a priority. In the end, I feel better and learn more from being with people and sharing ideas than I ever do alone with my own thoughts, which, frankly, aren’t very good.

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