Mental health ecologies and urban wellbeing

Maan Barua; Sushrut Jadhav; Gunjesh Kumar; Urvi Gupta; Priyanka Justa; Anindya Sinha

doi:10.1016/j.healthplace.2021.102577

Mental health ecologies and urban wellbeing

Health Place. 2021 May:69:102577. doi: 10.1016/j.healthplace.2021.102577. Epub 2021 Apr 29.

Authors

Maan Barua¹, Sushrut Jadhav², Gunjesh Kumar³, Urvi Gupta⁴, Priyanka Justa⁵, Anindya Sinha⁶

Affiliations

¹ University Lecturer in Human Geography, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, Downing Place, Cambridge, CB2 3EN, UK. Electronic address: maan.barua@geog.cam.ac.uk.
² Professor of Cultural Psychiatry, Division of Psychiatry, University College London, 6th Floor, Maple House, 149 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1T 7NF, UK. Electronic address: s.jadhav@ucl.ac.uk.
³ Researcher, Urban Animals Project, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Indian Institute of Science Campus, Bengaluru, 560 012, Karnataka, India. Electronic address: gunjeshsingh321@gmail.com.
⁴ Researcher, Urban Animals Project, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Indian Institute of Science Campus, Bengaluru, 560 012, Karnataka, India. Electronic address: guptaurvi1@gmail.com.
⁵ Researcher, Urban Animals Project, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Indian Institute of Science Campus, Bengaluru, 560 012, Karnataka, India. Electronic address: priyanka.justa28@gmail.com.
⁶ Professor of Animal Behaviour and Cognition, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Indian Institute of Science Campus, Bengaluru, 560 012, Karnataka, India. Electronic address: asinha@nias.res.in.

PMID: 33934063
DOI: 10.1016/j.healthplace.2021.102577

Abstract

How might urban mental health be understood when animals reconfigure human wellbeing in the lived city? Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork on people and macaques in New Delhi and forging novel conversations between urban studies, ecology and psychiatry, our ontology of urban mental health moves from lived experience of the built environment to those configured by dwelling with various interlocutors: animals, astral bodies and supernatural currents. These relations create microspaces of wellbeing, keeping forces of urban precarity at bay. This paper discusses mental health ecologies in different registers: subjectivity being environmental, its scale being relational rather than binary, enmeshed in the dynamics of other-than-human life, and involving conversations between medical and vernacular practices rather than hierarchies of knowledge.

Keywords: Animal; Clinical anthropology; Mental health; Multispecies ethnography; Psychiatry; Urban.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Anthropology, Cultural*
Built Environment
Cities
Humans
Mental Health*
Urban Health

Grants and funding

205766/Z/16/Z/WT_/Wellcome Trust/United Kingdom