Jocelyn Lim Chua
Biographic Data
| ID | 89857 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jocelyn Lim Chua |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jocelyn Lim |
| FAMILY NAME | Chua |
| SIGNATURE | CHUA J L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8576-2703 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 75 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The Psychological Anthropology of Mental Health and Psychiatric Treatment
Bloody war: Menstruation, soldiering, and the 'gender-integrated' United States military
Against the backdrop of an unprecedented number of women deploying in a new array of roles in the so-called "global war on terror" and the official opening of combat arms units to women in the United States military, menstruation has served as a key idiom in debates about what it means for women to wage war. In this article, I explore what public curiosity about and military anxieties over soldier menstruation can tell us about the banal and bodi…
Escaping the Clinic: Exposure as Care among Military Medical Professionals at War
This article examines exposure in the mobile reach of care in war in order to theorise exposure as care. It does so from the margins, focusing on US military medical professionals of the officer class in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, who feel distanced from the 'real' war experience represented by the infantry soldier, and thus engage in practices of exposure to gain the 'trust' and 'respect' of their soldier-patients. To grasp something of the …
Chemical Heroes: Pharmacological Supersoldiers in the US Military by Andrew Bickford
Reviewed by: Chemical Heroes: Pharmacological Supersoldiers in the US Military by Andrew Bickford Jocelyn Lim Chua Andrew Bickford. Chemical Heroes: Pharmacological Supersoldiers in the US Military. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. 320 pp. Augmented “supersoldiers” impervious to injury and death have long been the stuff of speculative science fiction and Hollywood fantasy. But as Andrew Bickford explores in his new book, they are also deadly …
Medication by Proxy: The Devolution of Psychiatric Power and Shared Accountability to Psychopharmaceutical Use Among Soldiers in America’s Post-9/11 Wars
With the United States military stretched thin in the “global war on terror,” military officials have embraced psychopharmaceuticals in the effort to enable more troops to remain “mission-capable.” Within the intimate conditions in which deployed military personnel work and live, soldiers learn to read for signs of psychopharmaceutical use by others, and consequently, may become accountable to those on medication in new ways. On convoys and in th…
Buddy Watch: Care and Constraint Under the Watchful Eye of Military Suicide Risk Management in War
Officially referred to as "unit watch" and more colloquially as "buddy watch," the use of continuous direct observation and restrictive measures enforced by peers is a widely used, though controversial, tool in the US Army's suicide prevention efforts. Borrowing from the Army concept and system of the battle buddy, the partnering of soldiers who assist each other in and out of combat, the unit watch is simultaneously conceived as a means of "fami…
Pharmaceutical Creep: U.S. Military Power and the Global and Transnational Mobility of Psychopharmaceuticals
In 2006, the United States Department of Defense developed for the first time official criteria for the use of psychopharmaceuticals “in theater”—in the physical and tactical spaces of military operations including active combat. Based on fieldwork with Army soldiers and veterans, this article explores the transnational and global dimensions of military psychopharmaceutical use in the post‐9/11 wars. I consider the spatial, material, and symbolic…
Fog of War: Psychopharmaceutical "Side Effects" and the United States Military
The unprecedented reliance today on psychiatric drugs to maintain mission readiness in war and to treat veterans at home has been the subject of ethical debate in the United States. While acknowledging these debates, I advocate for an ethnography of how US soldiers and veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars themselves articulate political and ethical tensions in their experiences of psychiatric drug treatment. Detailing one army veteran's inte…
Accumulating Death: Women’s Moral Agency and Domestic Economies of Care in South India
In Pursuit of the Good Life: Aspiration and Suicide in Globalizing South India
Once celebrated as a model of development for its progressive social indicators, the southern Indian state of Kerala has earned the new distinction: it is the nation's suicide capital. Since the 1990s, reported suicide rates have been double to triple the national average. Rather than an aberration on the path to development and modernity, Keralites understand the suicide crisis to be the bitter fruit borne of these historical struggles and the a…
Madness, Agency, and Healing Patients and Agents: Mental Illness, Modernity, and Islam in Sylhet, Bangladesh . By Alyson Callan. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012
Reaching Out to the People: The Cultural Production of Mental Health Professionalism in the South Indian Public Sphere
Although a significant body of scholarship has examined medical discourse in clinical and other institutional settings, far less has been studied in regard to the discursive activity of health professionals in the public sphere. This line of inquiry is particularly relevant in Kerala, south India, where, for reasons including felt obligation, the political economy of allopathic mental health care, and desires for social prestige, many psychologis…
Disquieting Gifts: Humanitarianism in New Delhi by Erica Bornstein
Tales of Decline: Reading Social Pathology into Individual Suicide in South India
"The Register of "Complaint: Psychiatric Diagnosis and the Discourse of Grievance in the South Indian Mental Health Encounter
In the language of the medical file, "complaint" refers to the symptoms and ailments reported by the patient. In this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2007 in the mental healthcare setting in South India to argue that the typology of "complaint" and the dialogic exchanges involved in its production mark a far wider catchment area for the allegations and grievances that circulate between patient, kin, clinician,…
Making Time for the Children: Self-Temporalization and the Cultivation of the Antisuicidal Subject in South India
This article examines suicide prevention among children in India's "suicide capital" of Kerala to interrogate the ways temporalization practices inform the cultivation of ethical, life-avowing subjects in late capitalism. As economic liberalization and migration expand consumer aspiration in Kerala, mental health experts link the quickening of material gratification in middle-class parenting to the production of insatiable, maladjusted, and impul…
Making Time for the Children: Self-Temporalization and the Cultivation of the Antisuicidal Subject in South India
This article examines suicide prevention among children in India's "suicide capital" of Kerala to interrogate the ways temporalization practices inform the cultivation of ethical, life-avowing subjects in late capitalism. As economic liberalization and migration expand consumer aspiration in Kerala, mental health experts link the quickening of material gratification in middle-class parenting to the production of insatiable, maladjusted, and impul…
"The Register of "Complaint: Psychiatric Diagnosis and the Discourse of Grievance in the South Indian Mental Health Encounter
In the language of the medical file, "complaint" refers to the symptoms and ailments reported by the patient. In this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2007 in the mental healthcare setting in South India to argue that the typology of "complaint" and the dialogic exchanges involved in its production mark a far wider catchment area for the allegations and grievances that circulate between patient, kin, clinician,…
Bloody war: Menstruation, soldiering, and the 'gender-integrated' United States military
Against the backdrop of an unprecedented number of women deploying in a new array of roles in the so-called "global war on terror" and the official opening of combat arms units to women in the United States military, menstruation has served as a key idiom in debates about what it means for women to wage war. In this article, I explore what public curiosity about and military anxieties over soldier menstruation can tell us about the banal and bodi…
Reaching Out to the People: The Cultural Production of Mental Health Professionalism in the South Indian Public Sphere
Although a significant body of scholarship has examined medical discourse in clinical and other institutional settings, far less has been studied in regard to the discursive activity of health professionals in the public sphere. This line of inquiry is particularly relevant in Kerala, south India, where, for reasons including felt obligation, the political economy of allopathic mental health care, and desires for social prestige, many psychologis…
Fog of War: Psychopharmaceutical "Side Effects" and the United States Military
The unprecedented reliance today on psychiatric drugs to maintain mission readiness in war and to treat veterans at home has been the subject of ethical debate in the United States. While acknowledging these debates, I advocate for an ethnography of how US soldiers and veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars themselves articulate political and ethical tensions in their experiences of psychiatric drug treatment. Detailing one army veteran's inte…
Buddy Watch: Care and Constraint Under the Watchful Eye of Military Suicide Risk Management in War
Officially referred to as "unit watch" and more colloquially as "buddy watch," the use of continuous direct observation and restrictive measures enforced by peers is a widely used, though controversial, tool in the US Army's suicide prevention efforts. Borrowing from the Army concept and system of the battle buddy, the partnering of soldiers who assist each other in and out of combat, the unit watch is simultaneously conceived as a means of "fami…
Making Time for the Children: Self-Temporalization and the Cultivation of the Antisuicidal Subject in South India
This article examines suicide prevention among children in India's "suicide capital" of Kerala to interrogate the ways temporalization practices inform the cultivation of ethical, life-avowing subjects in late capitalism. As economic liberalization and migration expand consumer aspiration in Kerala, mental health experts link the quickening of material gratification in middle-class parenting to the production of insatiable, maladjusted, and impul…
Tales of Decline: Reading Social Pathology into Individual Suicide in South India
"The Register of "Complaint: Psychiatric Diagnosis and the Discourse of Grievance in the South Indian Mental Health Encounter
In the language of the medical file, "complaint" refers to the symptoms and ailments reported by the patient. In this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2007 in the mental healthcare setting in South India to argue that the typology of "complaint" and the dialogic exchanges involved in its production mark a far wider catchment area for the allegations and grievances that circulate between patient, kin, clinician,…
Madness, Agency, and Healing Patients and Agents: Mental Illness, Modernity, and Islam in Sylhet, Bangladesh . By Alyson Callan. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012
Reaching Out to the People: The Cultural Production of Mental Health Professionalism in the South Indian Public Sphere
Although a significant body of scholarship has examined medical discourse in clinical and other institutional settings, far less has been studied in regard to the discursive activity of health professionals in the public sphere. This line of inquiry is particularly relevant in Kerala, south India, where, for reasons including felt obligation, the political economy of allopathic mental health care, and desires for social prestige, many psychologis…
Disquieting Gifts: Humanitarianism in New Delhi by Erica Bornstein
In Pursuit of the Good Life: Aspiration and Suicide in Globalizing South India
Once celebrated as a model of development for its progressive social indicators, the southern Indian state of Kerala has earned the new distinction: it is the nation's suicide capital. Since the 1990s, reported suicide rates have been double to triple the national average. Rather than an aberration on the path to development and modernity, Keralites understand the suicide crisis to be the bitter fruit borne of these historical struggles and the a…
Accumulating Death: Women’s Moral Agency and Domestic Economies of Care in South India
Fog of War: Psychopharmaceutical "Side Effects" and the United States Military
The unprecedented reliance today on psychiatric drugs to maintain mission readiness in war and to treat veterans at home has been the subject of ethical debate in the United States. While acknowledging these debates, I advocate for an ethnography of how US soldiers and veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars themselves articulate political and ethical tensions in their experiences of psychiatric drug treatment. Detailing one army veteran's inte…
Pharmaceutical Creep: U.S. Military Power and the Global and Transnational Mobility of Psychopharmaceuticals
In 2006, the United States Department of Defense developed for the first time official criteria for the use of psychopharmaceuticals “in theater”—in the physical and tactical spaces of military operations including active combat. Based on fieldwork with Army soldiers and veterans, this article explores the transnational and global dimensions of military psychopharmaceutical use in the post‐9/11 wars. I consider the spatial, material, and symbolic…
Medication by Proxy: The Devolution of Psychiatric Power and Shared Accountability to Psychopharmaceutical Use Among Soldiers in America’s Post-9/11 Wars
With the United States military stretched thin in the “global war on terror,” military officials have embraced psychopharmaceuticals in the effort to enable more troops to remain “mission-capable.” Within the intimate conditions in which deployed military personnel work and live, soldiers learn to read for signs of psychopharmaceutical use by others, and consequently, may become accountable to those on medication in new ways. On convoys and in th…
Buddy Watch: Care and Constraint Under the Watchful Eye of Military Suicide Risk Management in War
Officially referred to as "unit watch" and more colloquially as "buddy watch," the use of continuous direct observation and restrictive measures enforced by peers is a widely used, though controversial, tool in the US Army's suicide prevention efforts. Borrowing from the Army concept and system of the battle buddy, the partnering of soldiers who assist each other in and out of combat, the unit watch is simultaneously conceived as a means of "fami…
Bloody war: Menstruation, soldiering, and the 'gender-integrated' United States military
Against the backdrop of an unprecedented number of women deploying in a new array of roles in the so-called "global war on terror" and the official opening of combat arms units to women in the United States military, menstruation has served as a key idiom in debates about what it means for women to wage war. In this article, I explore what public curiosity about and military anxieties over soldier menstruation can tell us about the banal and bodi…
Escaping the Clinic: Exposure as Care among Military Medical Professionals at War
This article examines exposure in the mobile reach of care in war in order to theorise exposure as care. It does so from the margins, focusing on US military medical professionals of the officer class in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, who feel distanced from the 'real' war experience represented by the infantry soldier, and thus engage in practices of exposure to gain the 'trust' and 'respect' of their soldier-patients. To grasp something of the …
Chemical Heroes: Pharmacological Supersoldiers in the US Military by Andrew Bickford
Reviewed by: Chemical Heroes: Pharmacological Supersoldiers in the US Military by Andrew Bickford Jocelyn Lim Chua Andrew Bickford. Chemical Heroes: Pharmacological Supersoldiers in the US Military. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. 320 pp. Augmented “supersoldiers” impervious to injury and death have long been the stuff of speculative science fiction and Hollywood fantasy. But as Andrew Bickford explores in his new book, they are also deadly …
The Psychological Anthropology of Mental Health and Psychiatric Treatment
Political science (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Law (6 works) · History (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies (5 works) · Torture, Ethics, and Law (5 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (4 works)