Interprofessional Learning and Psychiatric Expertise in Mental Health Courts.

Background: Interprofessional collaboration is crucial to reduce overincarceration of people with severe mental illness. Learning how to collaborate occurs in 2 complementary ways. One model emphasizes cognitive tasks: becoming familiar with the values and knowledge of other disciplines.

Technologies of the Self and Ethnographic Praxis.

The authors contributing to this special issue draw on Foucault's notion of technologies of the self: the means by which people operate on their own bodies and souls in pursuit of self-transformation, always according to particular regimes of value. Foucault's notion remains attractive to anthropology: the technologies are ethnographically visible, and they illustrate how power affects the intimate realms of social life. The authors in this issue take up three problems: (1) the process by which people craft new subjectivities, (2) the genealogy of the new technologies of the self now circulating in East Asia, and (3) the forms of governance and political rationality that they justify.

The ethics of ambivalence and the practice of constraint in US psychiatry.

This article investigates the ambivalence of front-line mental health clinicians toward their power to impose treatment against people's will. Ambivalence denotes both inward uncertainty and a collective process that emerges in the midst of everyday work. In their commentaries about ambivalence, providers struggle with the distance separating their preferred professional self-image as caring from the routine practices of constraint.

Futility in the practice of community psychiatry.

The experience of futility among frontline clinicians in community psychiatry is produced by the temporal structuring of their work. All health care providers share the disposition to intervene in the course of disease. Specific notions about the course of severe mental illness are woven into the mission of Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) as well as the treatment plan, a key paperwork tool used to stage daily activities.

The assemblage of compliance in psychiatric case management.

In the post-asylum era, case managers perform much of the face-to-face work of pharmaceutical compliance for people with severe and persistent mental illness. Their work demands careful orchestration of the assemblage of compliance, including the actual medications, the ideology of biopsychiatry, the division of professional labor, and certain mundane tools. Ethnographic vignettes from an Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) team show how case managers use this assemblage in their everyday routines, but also how it undercuts key elements of the original ACT mission.

The coproduction of moral discourse in U.S. community psychiatry.

Anthropologists often criticize the discipline of bioethics because its remote, abstract theories fail to capture how front-line clinicians experience and resolve moral uncertainty. The critique overlooks, however, the ways that everyday, emergent moral discourse is influenced--over time and through several mediations--by formal ethical notions. High-order ethical pronouncements become sedimented into the conditions of work, illustrated in this article by a two-year ethnographic study of Assertive Community Treatment (ACT), a popular mode of outpatient psychiatric services.

"Bioethics in action" and human population genetics research.

Recent disputes about human population genetics research have been provoked by the field's political vulnerability (the historic imbalance of power between the geneticists and the people they study) and conceptual vulnerability (the mismatch between scientific and popular understandings of the genetic basis of collective identity). The small, isolated groups often studied by this science are now mobilizing themselves as political subjects, pressing sovereignty claims, and demanding control over the direction and interpretation of research. Negotiations between the geneticists and the people asked to donate DNA have resulted not only in explicit bioethics protocols but also in diffuse anxiety over the incommensurability between expert and non-expert views about genetic evidence for identity claims.