| Publication |
2008.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Psychiatric researchers recently have published evidence of eating disorders in regions around the world, despite previous conceptions of eating disorders as "culture-bound syndromes." What pressures or processes encourage this apparent spread of eating disorders diagnoses, and what do they tell us about state mental health policy? This paper argues that the spread of diagnoses results from global-level instances of assemblage: conglomerations of scientific expertise, state policy, international institutions, and practices employed with a will to improve the lives of perceived sufferers of mental disorder. Cases of global mental-health policy illustrate the ways in which mental health assemblage produces a "distrust in the 'self-governing' governed."
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