and extend across a range of different theoretical questions: mental health, preventative healthcare, self-cultivation; mindfulness, politics and well-being in the UK; monasticism, gender and ethics in Buddhist Thailand; power in Southeast Asia; detachment as an ethnographic object and as a theoretical tool; democracy, subjectivity and sociality.
Cook applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Making a Mindful Nation: Mental Health and Governance in the Twenty-First Century, and reported the following:
From page 99:Visit Joanna Cook's website.In interviews with members of the two Houses, this view was qualified somewhat, however, with members commenting that while they valued a sense of support within the mindfulness group, politics was combative, and it would be unreasonable to think that that would change. As a former Liberal Democrat minister told me as we took tea in the tea-room in the House of Lords a few weeks later, ‘This place is set up for opposition. Mindfulness helps me be well within that.’ Nonetheless, she said, mindfulness was far more than just a pragmatic tool. She attributed feeling happier and more settled in herself to her meditation practice; each day she noted her emotional experience on a chart that she kept next to her desk, and this daily practice of awareness supported her sense of well-being.The Page 99 Test is a partial success for Making a Mindful Nation and, as a bonus, there is a section break in the middle of the page, so page 99 covers a couple of key arguments.
On its own terms, popular psychology claims to offer insights into pan-human psychological processes of deliberation, choice and emotion. Tracing the social life of psychological ideas, however, it is possible to consider the culturally specific ways in which universalising psychological principles are interpreted and incorporated into how people understand themselves. As psychological knowledge travels, it is interpreted in diverse ways by different people, and is reinscribed with specific ethical and political meaning. By examining the social life of psychology, we might account for the meaning that people attribute to practices, organisational structures and ideas, and we might uncover the internalisation of values, the development of social imaginaries and the aspirations that motivate engagement with practices.
Making a Mindful Nation is an ethnography of mental health in Britain, examining the popularity of mindfulness, an awareness training practice originating in Buddhism that has been incorporated into preventative mental healthcare.
On page 99, I first discuss the ways in which British parliamentarians engage with mindfulness. In this short section, I describe their understanding of mindfulness as both a pragmatic mental health support and as an ethical practice for living more fully. This is a key argument of the book: that mindfulness is simultaneously informed by instrumental and ethical values. But, while I conducted anthropological fieldwork with parliamentarians, I also worked with people with a history of depression, mindfulness-based therapists, and political advocates. In the rest of the book, I unpack how this relationship between different values informs mental health interventions, people’s relationships with themselves, political campaigns, and public policy.
In the second passage on page 99, I set up the ‘social life of psychology’, arguing that while psychological ideas refer to the universal structures of human minds, they are incorporated into people’s lives in culturally specific ways. This points to a second key finding of the book: that the category of ‘mental health’ has changed in recent years. In the book, I show that mental health is increasingly thought of as a transversal issue, as important for psychologist as for patients, politicians as for constituents. On page 99, readers get a glimpse of my argument that what we think about the mind matters.
--Marshal Zeringue
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