Critical Mental Health

The Rare Disease Social Research Center (RDSRC) at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences organized a seminar series “Critical Mental Health” in 2022–2023. The seminars featured lectures by leading scholars from the United Kingdom, Japan, and New Zealand working in mental health research.

In recent decades, mental health has become increasingly present in both global and local public discourse; the COVID-19 pandemic only intensified discussions of the mental health crisis. The seminars aimed to introduce this underexplored perspective to the Polish academic community and to foster interdisciplinary dialogue between sociology, anthropology, and medicine. The topics addressed during the seminars included the Marxist critique of psychiatry and psychology, the global spread of the category of depression and its consequences, the significance of cross-cultural and comparative perspectives on mental health, and the implications of wartime experiences for societal mental health.

Recordings of the seminars can be viewed on the YouTube playlist.

Previous lectures

16.01.2024 – Prof. Claudia Lang (University of Leipzig & Tufts University): “Machine learning to care: Imagining, encoding and experiencing automated therapy in India”. Recording

24.10.2023 – Prof. Domonkos Sik (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary): “Empty Suffering: A Historical Phenomenology of Depression”. Recording

23.11.2023 – Prof. Amy Chandler (University of Edinburgh, UK): “Explaining Mental Illness: Sociological Perspectives”. Recording

24.01.2023 – Prof. Orkideh Behrouzan (SOAS University of London, UK): “Mental Health and Postwar Societies”.

22.11.2022 – Prof. Stefan Ecks (University of Edinburgh, UK): “Critical Mental Health – Cross-cultural Perspectives”.

25.10.2022 – Prof. Junko Kitanaka (Keio University, Tokyo, Japan): “Towards Global Social Medicine: A Medical Anthropological Perspective on Depression”. Recording

22.09.2022 – Dr Bruce Cohen (University of Auckland, New Zealand): “The Urgency for Critical Thinking in the Sociology of Mental Health”. Recording