Mental health ecologies and urban wellbeing.

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.

Are protected areas required to maintain functional diversity in human-modified landscapes?

The conversion of forest to agriculture across the world's tropics, and the limited space for protected areas, has increased the need to identify effective conservation strategies in human-modified landscapes. Isolated trees are believed to conserve elements of ecological structure, providing micro-sites for conservation in matrix landscapes, and facilitating seed dispersal and forest restoration. Here we investigate the role of isolated Ficus trees, which are of critical importance to tropical forest ecosystems, in conserving frugivore composition and function in a human-modified landscape in Assam, India.

The Elephant Vanishes: impact of human-elephant conflict on people's wellbeing.

Human-wildlife conflicts impact upon the wellbeing of marginalised people, worldwide. Although tangible losses from such conflicts are well documented, hidden health consequences remain under-researched. Based on preliminary clinical ethnographic inquiries and sustained fieldwork in Assam, India, this paper documents mental health antecedents and consequences including severe untreated psychiatric morbidity and substance abuse.

Stigmatization of severe mental illness in India: Against the simple industrialization hypothesis.

Background: Major international studies on course and outcome of schizophrenia suggest a better prognosis in the rural world and in low-income nations. Industrialization is thought to result in increased stigma for mental illness, which in turn is thought to worsen prognosis. The lack of an ethnographically derived and cross-culturally valid measure of stigma has hampered investigation.