Discourse and Mental Health

Juan Eduardo Bonnin is Researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) and Professor of Discourse Studies at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM). His latest book is Discurso político y discurso religioso en América Latina (Buenos Aires, Santiago Arcos, 2013).

• Introduction 1. Voice, Singularity and Emergency: A Discursive Perspective on Linguistic Inequality 2. Psychoanalysis in Public Hospitals: Context as a Discursive Problem 3. Invisible Landscapes: Diversity and the Semiosis of Space 4. Diagnosis and Treatment: Sequencing and Exclusion 5. Resisting Exclusion: Patients’ Tactics of Misunderstanding 6. Speaking with the Other’s Voice: An Attempt to Close the Gap 7. Discourse and Activism: Dissent, Protest and Resistance 8. Epilogue

'Bonnin offers us, apart from an outstanding case study, a passionate argument for recognizing a truly authentic Latin American approach to discourse analysis. The lived sociocultural and political experience of intellectuals in a thoroughly complex sociolinguistic area such as Latin America offers readers more than a theoretical and analytical reflection: it also invites us to rethink the geopolitics of voice in a globalized intellectual community.' — Professor Jan Blommaert, Department of Culture Studies, Tilburg University'The circumference of the topic treated in this monograph, Discourse and Mental Health, necessarily demands a broad theoretical and analytical canvas. Bonnin meticulously lives up to the challenge in mapping the interactional/situational nexus of professional-patient encounters on to the sociocultural/political landscape of Argentinian public healthcare delivery. Marking a visible shift from the dominantly available ethnocentric perspective to a desirable ethnographic perspective, the monograph embodies what I consider a robust ethnopolitical ‘voice’ in order to facilitate a critical appraisal of mental healthcare delivery in an immigrant neighbourhood in Buenos Aires. Framed as action-research inclusive of silent diversities/discourses and patients’ resistance, it emanates an interventionist spirit, complemented by a wide-ranging but integrated discourse analytical approach informed by long-term fieldwork.' — Srikant Sarangi, Professor in Humanities and Medicine, Aalborg University, Denmark; Honorary Professor, Cardiff University, United Kingdom