Dr. Aaron Neiman is a medical anthropologist studying the growing popularization of ‘therapy culture’ in the Global North. His research focuses on the rollout of e-mental health programs for wealthy anglophone publics, particularly self-guided behavioral interventions delivered via apps and websites. His dissertation research was an ethnography of the development of these programs in Australia, where this new “therapy without therapists” enjoys significant public funding as part of a government health initiative. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He received his PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University in 2023 and, prior to joining CMHSR, lectured in the Department of Anthropology at WashU during the ’23-’24 school year.
Due to the rigorous nature of the scientific enterprise, professional mental health researchers are often– by necessity– narrowly focused on the explicit parameters set out in their studies. As intelligent, observant human beings, however, it is common for these individuals to also have well-informed critiques and observations about the ‘big picture’ in which the science is being done. Because such researchers are primarily focused on collecting and analyzing data and publishing papers according to study design, they may feel disempowered to question the underlying premises of the larger research project they are working on. In this talk, I draw on examples from original ethnographic fieldwork in a variety of e-mental health research organizations in Australia. I show how researchers there almost uniformly express concern about their studies avoiding the ‘real’ causes of population-level mental illness, and about the advisability of automated mental healthcare in general. I show how pressure from funders and executives keeps these kinds of widely shared concern private and atomized, as a kind of ‘public secret.’ I suggest that ethnography can help research organizations identify this trap in which everyone operates under a kind of false consensus.
