Project Details
Projekt
Afflicted Minds – ‘Madness’, morality, and emotions in rural Bali
Applicant
Professor Dr. Thomas Stodulka
Subject Area
Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
Term
since 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 460656552
The Indonesian archipelago is the fourth most populous nation worldwide. Extreme inequality, and cultural and religious diversity mark illness experiences, narratives, and psychiatric care. Most mental health professionals concentrate in large urban areas (particularly in Java, and in the capital city). Families and kin cover costs involved for hospitalization and treatment of someone diagnosed with a mental illness. These structural developments affected in 2013 around 400,000 people that suffered from diagnosed severe mental afflictions, and that relied heavily on their families for their support in addition to the government's initiatives on universal health care (BPJS).The psychiatric care profile of Bali confirms these dynamics as many people remain at the margins of the health system and do not receive continuous care despite the government's push for universal health care. Apart from structural challenges, social and cultural ways of perceiving mental health and illness shape individual and collective experiences of affliction. Family members and kin, biomedical practitioners, and ‘traditional healers’ negotiate political, social, and personal meanings without separating the experience of mental illness from Balinese worlds of spiritual forces and entities. Scholars and mental health practitioners agree that this negotiation appears to leave a positive mark on the illness experience and illness outcome of those suffering from a psychiatric disorder. However, with the recent expansion of the biomedical model beyond urban centers, these relationships and negotiations have become increasingly strained and contested. The resulting tensions are not a particularity of Bali and have been described in other contexts. And yet, there is only limited in-depth research dealing with how illness experience (not diagnose) is shaped at the conjunction of local and global knowledge parameters, especially when it comes to insights from the Global South. Bali is no exception to this research blind spot. Focusing on Bali, Indonesia–apart from presenting much-needed input from the Global South to burgeoning Global Health trajectories–this project promises valuable contributions to current debates on mental health experience, schizophrenia in particular, and care for two main reasons. First, Bali has established itself as a hub for international cooperation on mental health and illness. Based on professional networks already initiated during exploratory fieldwork, this project is well connected to the local and international institutions working on mental health and illness on the island and beyond. Second, it investigates the illness experience associated with severe psychiatric disorders as moral, cognitive, and emotional processes. This analytic link has not been studied so far and promises to provide an in-depth description of how global knowledge flows influence personal and social illness trajectories and outcomes outside of the Global North.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
International Connection
Indonesia, USA
