“Reaching Out to the People”: The Cultural Production of Mental Health Professionalism in the South Indian Public Sphere

Abstract

AbstractAlthough a significant body of scholarship has examined medical discourse in clinical and other institutional settings, far less has been studied in regard to the discursive activity of health professionals in the public sphere. This line of inquiry is particularly relevant in Kerala, south India, where, for reasons including felt obligation, the political economy of allopathic mental health care, and desires for social prestige, many psychologists and psychiatrists actively engage the public as lecturers, authors, and guests of television and radio programs alongside their clinical work. Ethnographic attention to discursive activity in the public sphere reveals how these experts blur the boundaries between clinical and popular registers of speech and forge alternative ethical sensibilities and values that challenge institutionally prescribed ideas of clinical professionalism. They do so in ways that can attract reprobation and accusations of quackery among critical peers who hold competing ideas of where, how, and to whom mental health professionals “should” speak.