Dr. Milena Bister – Conceptions of chronic mental illness and urban living at the margins
Abstract
This work explores classification practices in and about mental health. In particular, I examine how the concept of chronicity, understood as a “concept multiple”, affects the ways of knowing, governing and experiencing health and illness within the public mental health system and in urban life more broadly. With a practice-based approach to chronicity, and based on my ethnographic research, I demonstrate that the concept not only denotes a person, an illness or an experience, but that it is tightly associated with the practices that arrange healthcare and urban living at the margins. Building on these results, my work discusses the need to redefine ‘health’ and ‘illness’, ‘the mental’ and ‘the environmental’ in anthropological theory and to reinvent anthropological methodology.