Lecture image placeholder

Premium content

Access to this content requires a subscription. You must be a premium user to view this content.

Monthly subscription - $9.99Pay per view - $4.99Access through your institutionLogin with Underline account
Need help?
Contact us
Lecture placeholder background
VIDEO DOI: https://doi.org/10.48448/1wb7-8v54

technical paper

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

November 18, 2021

Baltimore, United States

Proximity and Suspicion: The Transition to Community Mental Health in Lima, Peru

keywords:

decolonization

mental health

ethics

Peru is currently undergoing an important institutional transition regarding mental health. Since 2016, the government has started transitioning state-sponsored treatment for several mental illnesses from an asylum/institutionalization model to a community mental health model. To effectively address mental health afflictions and other psychosocial conditions in the wake of de-institutionalization, the goal is to build at least one hundred community mental health centers around the country. Thus far, twenty-nine have been built. This reform also aims to place mental health in the public agenda and address the stigma surrounding mental illness. In this paper, I present the case of the community mental health center in Carabayllo, the “flagship” facility of the ongoing reform, located in a poor semi-urban district at the outskirts of Lima, Peru. Drawing from three months of fieldwork and interviews with psychiatrists, community mental health workers and residents of Carabayllo, I argue that this transitional moment provides insight into the dynamics that arise in the community when total institutions start to fade away. I explore residents’ reflections on this transition, considering in particular the anxieties they express over the proximity of mental illness and the symbolic and spatial dimensions they reveal of the relationship between clinic and community. With the asylum reconfiguring and the community-based model spreading in the city through its different agents, I signal the diverse challenges the residents of Carabayllo articulate against the closeness of mental illness and the extension of the clinic.

Downloads

Transcript English (automatic)

Next from AAA Annual Meeting 2021

New and Emerging Perspectives in the Anthropology of Mental Health I
technical paper

New and Emerging Perspectives in the Anthropology of Mental Health I

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

18 November 2021

Similar lecture

Our Long Ride on the Short Bus: Syndemics, Support, and the Social Security Disability System
technical paper

Our Long Ride on the Short Bus: Syndemics, Support, and the Social Security Disability System

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

J Therese Poat

18 November 2021