Trauma is a concept with wide-ranging impact, moving out of limited psychiatric fields into the popular imagination and policy (Fassin 2009). Psychologists now accompany medical doctors in the wake of disasters, ranging from wildfires to war, bringing with them instruments to diagnose, measure, and treat victims. Feeding into neuropsychiatric research on the effects of trauma, epigenetic studies have established yet another …
Tag Archives: Psychiatry
Techno-geographies of digital phenotyping in mental health research
Can your phone keep you mentally well?
Developments in digital phenotyping have brought new attention to forms of behavioural data collection that capitalise on the apparent ubiquity of mobile phone use and the fact that many people are almost constantly connected to digital devices. A phenotype refers to observable characteristics understood to be shaped by genetics and/or the environment. Digital …
Digital exclusions: mental health and digital life
This article is part of the series: Tracking Digital Psy
We are closing our series with a podcast that turns to the absences and missing voices emerging alongside Digital Psy; the lifeworlds and experiences of those not interpellated into digital care. In this podcast, we explore the notion of “digital exclusion”, commonly used to describe the challenges of digital participation in terms of a lack of devices or skills. Here, we approach digital exclusion as an empirical artifact and trace its edge through policy, care provision, technology design, and the everyday.
The first part focuses on the UK, where we talk to a disability activist and share the highlights of a “theatre of the oppressed” workshop that took place in London. Collectively we produced artistic responses to the theme “digital exclusion” with people who experienced barriers to …
Mapping Algorithmic Assumptions: Reflections from a Society for Psychological Anthropology roundtable
This article is part of the series: Tracking Digital Psy
Fritz Kahn, Der Mensch als Industriepalast, 1926. Detail. Image in public domainIntroduction: surveil, classify and predict
by Alexa Hagerty and Livia Garofalo
The works distilled by the authors and the discussion offered by Professor Emily Martin presented here were originally part of a roundtable at the Society for Psychological Anthropology 2021 biannual meeting. They seek to map the algorithmic …
Form, Content, Data, Bodies: Jonathan Zong and Beth Semel on Biometric Sans
This article is part of the series: Tracking Digital Psy
The dominant discourse surrounding digital psy technologies such as MindStrong, a teletherapy app designed to detect mental health changes by monitoring changes in typing speed “down to the millisecond”, is that they uncover interior states by gathering psychologically rich data that was always there. But as the Tracking Digital Psy series editors outline in their call for contributors…
The Third Choice: Suicide Hotlines, Psychiatry, and the Police
This article is part of the series: Tracking Digital Psy
With Covid-19 showing no sign of abating, mental health care (from ongoing therapy to helplines) continues to be an important site of treatment for many Americans. While traditional therapy has continued to be prohibitively expensive for most, teletherapy has been covered by most major health insurance companies since the early days of the pandemic and is currently free for …