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Self-help and Community Care in Post-Revolutionary Cairo
Abstract
In the years following the 2011 revolution in Egypt, mental health “talk” has flourished throughout the urban middle class. Psychiatrists are hosted on prime-time talk-shows, characters in popular Ramadan shows suffer from mental health challenges, books on the topic increasingly appear in Arabic and social media act as a testimonial space for the many who now seek to share their “own story”. Globalized self-help exercises such as mediation and yoga appear alongside a newfound interest in the more local Sufi- practices. Simultaneously, conventional forms of psychotherapy are becoming increasingly popular as tools to manage individual psychic and emotional pain. In conversations with practitioners in the field, I have been made aware of the intense destigmatization the topic of mental health has undergone over the last decade. This project asks why this destigmatization has occurred at this precise historical moment. As such, I examine why affliction, as well as its healing practices is increasingly expressed through an individualized language of mental health. In exploring this, I place the phenomenon within the context of the recent years’ violent crackdowns, restrictions on communal dissent and an intense economic downturn in Egypt and propose these individual practices as cloaked forms of community care in a shared challenging present.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
Health