Mental-E-Healthy: Digital Mental Health Care in India

• In Event: Interrogating Innovation in Global Digital Mental Health

Abstract

Stress, tension and mental distress range high in India’s megacities, and suicide rates in the IT capital Bangalore are the highest in India. Economists and employers are concerned about decreased productivity and high absentisms through stress, depression or anxiety. Stigma of mental illness and fear of job loss often prevent employees in India from seeking psychiatric or psychological help. Globalizing mental health and psy discourses increasingly migrate into the digital medium. Indian entrepreneurs and investors have discovered the commercial value of catering for stress and mental distress for the young, tech-savvy and mostly English speaking new Indian ‘netizens’. Digital mental health care in India offers non-stigmatized, anonymous and 24/7 services outside the clinic based on connecting customers to online counselors, mental health apps or artificial intelligence. While optimists celebrate these innovations as new forms of agency, empowerment and care, critics are concerned about new forms of surveillance and control, de-politization of social suffering and de-humanization of care through digital health care and self-care. Building on theories from anthropology and STS and on interviews and digital ethnography, I will move beyond these normative debates and focus on new ways of self-production, (self) care and affective labor enabled through digital psy-technologies. Online counseling and mental health apps as psy-techno assemblages need to be understood, I argue, as ‘global forms’ (Collier & Ong 2005) that are situated in specific local social and moral worlds.

Author

• Claudia Lang, Centre de Recherche Médecine, Sciences, Santé, Santé Mentale et Société (cermes3), Paris