Kalman Applbaum, PhD is associate professor of anthropology (Ph.D. Harvard 1992) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His current research compares the role of psycho-pharmaceuticals in the process of deinstitutionalization of mental healthcare in Japan and the United States. He is the author of The Marketing Era: From Professional Practice to Global Provisioning (Routledge 2003).
Françoise Baylis, PhD is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Bioethics and Philosophy at Dalhousie University and founder of the NovelTechEthics research team (www.noveltechethics.ca). Her research focuses on issues of identity, community and social justice. She writes about the ethics of novel technologies (especially those related to genetics, stem cells, and neuroscience), research involving humans, women’s health, and feminist ethics. A public intellectual as well as scholar, Professor Baylis is currently a member of the Board of Directors of Assisted Human Reproduction Canada and the Board of Directors for the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport. In the recent past, she was also a member of the Governing Council of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). Currently Professor Baylis is Principal Investigator on two CIHR grants in neuroethics: “States of Mind: Emerging Issues in Neuroethics” (2006-2011) and “Therapeutic Hopes and Ethical Concerns: Clinical Research in the Neurosciences” (2005-2009). She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy with a specialization in medical ethics from the University of Western Ontario.
Joel Braslow, MD, PhD is a psychiatrist and historian whose work focuses on the social, cultural, and scientific constitution of therapeutic practices in medicine and psychiatry. His work examines twentieth-century American psychiatric practices, employing historical and health services research methods. He has been a faculty member in the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences since 1992, and the UCLA Department of History since 1996. Dr. Braslow received his M.D. from Loma Linda University and his Ph.D. in History of Science from UCLA. His first book, “Mental Ills and Bodily Cures,” examined the ways in which physicians employed somatic and biological therapies, and how these uses were shaped by social and cultural concerns. Currently, he is working on “Antipsychotic drugs: science, practice, and culture, a history of antipsychotic drugs” from the 1950s to the present. The primary aim of this project is to explore how social and cultural factors shape, and are shaped by, clinical and scientific practices. This project is funded by a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Career Development Award and aims to integrate methods from history, anthropology, and health services research.
Johanne Collin, PhD, a sociologist and historian, is a professor in the Medication and Population Health Program of the Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Montréal, where she teaches the sociology of health and the history of medicine. Her doctoral thesis, published in 1995 (Changement d’ordonnance, Editions Boréal) examined the history of pharmacy in Québec from 1880 to 1980 and the transformation in pharmacy practice occasioned by the rapid growth of the pharmaceutical industry in the twentieth century. She did her post-doctoral work in Paris at the Institut de recherche sur les sociétés contemporaines (CNRS) and in Montréal at McGill University in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine, where her research interests turned toward the social and cultural practices associated with medication use in Western societies. Her research explores medical rationales and professional dynamics; medication use and the recent cultural history of the body; and psychotropic medications and the new sociality. For the past four years, she has headed a research group working on medication as social object (le médicament comme objet social, MÉOS). She has just published Le Médicament au cœur de la socialité contemporaine (Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2006) and is currently conducting research on the ways in which knowledge about medications is disseminated via the mass media and the Internet.
Stefan Ecks, MA, DEA, PhD is Co-Director of the Sociology & Anthropology of Health & Illness (SAHI) Programme at the University of Edinburgh. He studied anthropology, sociology and philosophy at Göttingen, Berkeley, Paris (EHESS), and London (SOAS, LSE), and graduated with a Ph.D. in anthropology from the London School of Economics in 2003. From 2001 to 2004, he taught at the South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, building up Germany’s first dedicated programme in medical anthropology. Since 2004, he teaches social and medical anthropology at the School of Social & Political Studies, University of Edinburgh. He has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Kolkata (Calcutta, India) since 1999, focusing on postcolonial notions of body, health and healing. His current research examines emerging concepts of pharmaceutical citizenship and the impact of evidence-based medicine in India. From 2006 to 2009, he is taking part in a collaborative project that traces the trajectories of three key drugs (fluoxetine, oxytocin, rifampicin) through production, distribution, prescription and consumption in India and Nepal.
Nate Greenslit, PhD recently completed his doctorate in the History and Social Study of Science & Technology at MIT. His dissertation was entitled: “Pharmaceutical Relationships: Intersections of Illness, Fantasy, and Capital in the Age of Direct-to-Consumer Marketing.” Nate is currently a visiting scholar in the Anthropology Program at MIT. He is conducting new ethnographic research among healthcare marketing research companies and pharmaceutical industry consultants.
Norman Hoffman, MD is the Director of the McGill Mental Health Service and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, McGill University. He has over twenty years of experience in working with student populations, with a particular interset in the treatment of Personality Disorders.
Sushrut Jadhav, MBBS, MD, MRCPsych., PhD, is Senior Lecturer in Cross-cultural Psychiatry at University College London; Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist in Adult Psychiatric Intensive Care, St. Pancras Hospital, London; and Founding Editor, Anthropology and Medicine Journal. His current interests include the deployment of cultural formulation approach in acute mental health, ethnography of heart hospitals, identities and conflicts in Mumbai’s underworld, and the culture-bound nature of academic Cultural Psychiatry. He is also Co-Director (with S. Dein and R. Littlewood) of University College London Masters in Culture and Health.
Sumeet Jain, BA, MSW is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Behavioural and Social Sciences in Medicine, University College London. Trained in Development Studies at the University of Toronto and in Social Work at McGill University, his doctoral work has been looking at the cultural appropriateness of community mental health policies and services in India. Based on fieldwork in northern India, this has involved ethnography of a community psychiatry team and a rural community serviced by the team.
Laurence J. Kirmayer, MD is James McGill Professor and Director, Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Transcultural Psychiatry and directs the Culture and Mental Health Research Unit of the Jewish General Hospital where he conducts research on the anthropology of psychiatry, models of mental health services for multicultural societies, and resilience among indigenous peoples. He is co-editor of Understanding Trauma: Integrating Biological, Clinical and Cultural Perspectives (Cambridge) and Healing Traditions: The Mental Health of Canadian Aboriginal Peoples (UBC Press).
Kelly A. McKinney, MA, PhD, is currently a post-doctoral fellow in the Departments of Social Studies of Medicine and the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University. She is co-director of an SSHRC-funded research project that examines both macro (political economy, socio-cultural) and micro (subjectivity, selfhood) dimensions of psychotropic drug use among teenagers in Montréal. Laurence J. Kirmayer, M.D., is the principal investigator for this study. Dr. McKinney has a master’s degree in clinical psychology and a doctorate in anthropology. Her doctoral research, completed at The City University of New York Graduate Center, focused on therapeutic interventions for survivors of torture and refugee trauma in New York and Copenhagen, Denmark. The current project represents a continuation of her interest in the anthropology of psychiatry, and the ways in which both psychological distress and interventions are culturally produced.
Jonathan M. Metzl, MD, PhD, is Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Women’s Studies and Director of Program in Culture, Health, and Medicine at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In this capacity he works as a Senior Attending Physician in the adult psychiatric clinics and teaches courses in the areas of history of psychiatry, gender, and health at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He is the author of Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs (Duke, 2003) and editor of Difference and Identity in Medicine (JHUP, 2005). His work has appeared in journals including the Lancet, American Journal of Psychiatry, Social Science and Medicine, Harvard Review of Psychiatry, Gender and History, and SIGNS: The Journal of Women, Culture, and Society. His research has been supported by grants from such funding agencies as the Women’s Health office of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, ACLS, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD), among other sources.
Michael Oldani, PhD is Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin – Whitewater. He trained at Princeton University (PhD 2006) and the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee (MS 1998). His overall project has been to follow prescriptions (‘scripts”) through their various life-cycles in order to develop key ethnographic sites of inquiry. Initially, his ethnographic work described the impact of pharmaceutical sales practices (i.e. gift exchanges) on doctor prescribing habits at the site of the clinical encounter between reps and doctors. For part of this project he drew upon his nine-year experience within the pharmaceutical industry (1989-1998) as a salesperson (see “Thick Prescriptions,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 18(3), 2004). His more recent work has followed scripts into the home of families in order to ethnographically assess the impact of psychoactive medication on family life from a critical medical anthropological perspective. This work is divided into two overlapping research projects: the mainstream desire of using psychoactive medication to harmonize family relations and the continued use of psychoactive medication to control marginalized populations, namely Aboriginal children. He is currently working on a manuscript based on his dissertation (Filling Scripts: A Multisited Ethnography of Pharmaceutical Sales Practices, Psychiatric Prescribing, and Phamily Life in North America) for submission to Cornell University Press.
Amir Raz is Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University He received his PhD in computation and information processing in the brain from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He went on to be a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Michael I. Posner in the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York, USA. He was then appointed to the position of assistant professor at Cornell University, and subsequently Columbia University, New York. He is the recipient of multiple accolades, including the 2006 Young Investigator Award from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Affective Disorders and the 2005 Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association (Division 30). He is a diplomate of the American Board of Psychological Hypnosis. Having examined the safety and efficacy of psychiatric drugs across development, his active research interests span the neural and psychological substrates of attention, expectation, placebo and consciousness, as well as developmental psychopathology and neuroimaging. Using neuroimaging and other techniques, his research elucidates the relationship between disparate attention networks and attentional planes such as hypnosis.
Andrea Tone, PhD is the Canada Research Chair in the Social History of Medicine. She holds joint appointments in the Department of Social Studies of Medicine and the Department of History at McGill University. Her scholarship explores medical technology, sexuality, psychiatry, and industry, particularly the intersection between patient experience, cultural contexts, and technological and economic change in nineteenth and twentieth-century America. She is the author of several books and edited volumes, including Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America and, most recently, Medicating Modern America: Prescription Drugs in History, with Elizabeth Siegel Watkins. She is currently writing a book on the history of anxiolytics (under contract with Basic Books) and is beginning research on a project on Cold War psychopharmacology funded by an operating grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.