"Madness and Despair are a Force": Global Mental Health, and How People and Cultures Challenge the Hegemony of Western Psychiatry.

The author suggests to consider some important hidden connections in Global Mental Health (GMH) discourse and interventions, above all the political meaning of suffering and symptoms, the power of psychiatric diagnostic categories (both Western and traditional) to name and to occult at once other conflicts, and the implicit criticism expressed by so-called local healing knowledge and its epistemologies. These issues, by emphasizing the importance to explore other ontologies, help to understand the perplexity and resistance that GMH and its agenda meet among many scholars and professionals, who denounce the risks of reproducing and globalizing Western hegemonic values concerning health, illness, and healing.

Traumatic pasts and the historical imagination: Symptoms of loss, postcolonial suffering, and counter-memories among African migrants.

This work aims to rethink the relationship between anthropology and cultural psychiatry from a historical perspective, through reflections on the dynamics of forgetting and remembering in the context of migration. While migrants' symptoms often bear cultural hallmarks of suffering, they also reveal images of a traumatic history, which resurface in moments of danger, uncertainty, and crisis. I claim these symptoms are allegories of a dispossessed past, and can be interpreted as counter-memories, as "palimpsests" of an eclipsed script.

The Moral Economy of Lying: Subjectcraft, Narrative Capital, and Uncertainty in the Politics of Asylum.

Based on narratives of asylum-seekers from sub-Saharan Africa in northern Italy, in this article I analyze the narrative strategies used by immigrants to meet the eligibility criteria established by asylum law. For many of them, this means "arranging" biographical details within what I call "a moral economy of lying." The first question I discuss is what types of experience and 'subject positions' these narrative strategies reveal or generate.

Politics of healing and politics of culture: ethnopsychiatry, identities and migration.

Ethnopsychiatry is today a contested field, in which concepts and terms such as ethnicity, identity, culture, citizenship, traditional therapies or symbolic efficacy are used in a very controversial way. Recent accusations of'racism' against some ethnopsychiatrists have contributed to making more obscure the deep roots of these issues and controversies. Little attention has been paid to analysing the complex legacy of colonial psychiatry, as well as the relationships among current definitions of 'culture' and 'belonging', post-colonial subjectivities and migration.