Race, Risk and Governmentality in Psychiatric Rhetoric: The Case of Depression Awareness Campaigns

• In Event: Risk, Governing and Governmentality

Abstract

(Please Consider for Emerging Scholars Panel.) The Depression is Real Campaign articulates racial and cultural differences as “risks” in the context of illness that must be eradicated through individual initiatives via the agency of medical science. Highly visible appeals to race are ultimately neutralized in the campaign’s affirmation of a mobile neoliberal subjectivity unencumbered by the “weight” of racial history, structural inequality, or collective identification.

Author

• Davi Johnson-Thornton, Southwestern University