what is this?

Bear with me, I’m a word nerd: Skeptiki is my Anglicized take on σκεπτική (skep-tee-‘key, with the emphasis on the last syllable). It’s a derivative of a favorite word that my Yia Yia-in law uses often, a verb my husband loosely translates to “mull it over.” I’ve been called a cynic through most stages of my life, so with this term I’ve decided to reclaim the territory as thoughtful reluctance rather than flat-out disillusionment. Because I’m not actually a cynic, in the sense that I feel totally hopeless about the state of the world literally all of the time (though I am in degrees for much of it, these days); I just doubt that peoples’ intentions are inherently good, and even when they are I rarely trust they’ve done enough groundwork to support or inform their actions. When UNICEF builds wells that create generations of physical and neurological impairments among the Bangladeshi poor, we have reason to doubt that all well-meaning projects are in themselves good things. This is a healthy sort of doubt, the kind that sourced the mercury poisoning epidemic and led to the abatement or redigging of those wells. Paired with empathy and creative energy, it’s the only thing I really believe can change the world–and even admitting that feels sentimental.

Medical anthropology is built around this doubt, this pause to consider the origins and intent of medical authority, or health management, or pharmaceutical marketing and distribution. Before you swallow that pill, do you know why you’re doing it? As someone who wrote that sentence and still can’t answer for herself, it feels off-putting to regulate my brain chemistry, my hormones, my nutrition, and my pain through a cascade of capsules so that I can fit the demands of my life. Why not flip it the other way around, and ditch the pills–Is my illness something wrong with me, or is it something wrong with society? Those are the sorts of questions we ask in the anthropological abstract and demonstrate through participant-observation research, so I’m using my front-and-center ride through medicalized anxiety and depression to give you my ethnographic insights on the construction and experience of mental illness.