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 …
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 …
This article is part of the following 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 …
This article is part of the following series: Tracking Digital Psy
Introduction
Over the past 15 years, several groups of researchers have sought to use clinical trials to reintroduce psychedelics to mainstream society, reporting impressive efficacy from trials at university sites such as Johns Hopkins, New York University and Imperial College London, in the treatment of clinical targets such as unipolar depression and anxiety, addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) …
This article is part of the following 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 …
In Nicholas Bartlett’s meditative and poignant ethnography about former heroin users in Gejiu, China, Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Post-Reform China (University of California Press 2020), he writes of arriving too late to the scene of the epidemic. Heroin use was widespread in this tin mining region in the 1980s, had peaked in the 1990s, and was …