I’m very pleased to welcome Neely Myers as our newest regular contributor to Somatosphere.

Neely Myers received her PhD from the University of Chicago’s Department of Comparative Human Development in August 2009.  Her research interests include medical and psychological anthropology, schizophrenia and severe mental illnesses, cross-cultural strategies for mental health, and the intersections of society, theories of mind, and neuroscience.  She is currently working under a NIH T32 fellowship at the University of Virginia’s Center for the Study of Complementary and Alternative Therapies where she investigates the use of mindfulness meditation to help people with psychotic disorders.  In general, Dr. Myers investigates therapies that have been socially and culturally endorsed by people in recovery from severe mental illness around the world (such as meditation, hearing voices groups, and yoga) but have not been made part of mainstream psychiatric treatment.  Through her research, Dr. Myers hopes to assess the efficacy of these therapies, help bring them into the mainstream, and ethnographically investigate the reception of complementary therapies by users and practitioners of biomedical psychiatry.  Currently, Dr. Myers is collecting data for an ethnography of the use of complementary and alternative therapies for mental health in Virginia and developing a clinical trial of mindfulness practices for users of the public mental health system.

Welcome, Neely; we look forward to reading your posts!