Ekedi Mpondo-Dika Ph.D. Candidate - Harvard University Sociologie |
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03.07.2017-31.08.2017
A New Medicalization of Poverty? Ethical and Policy Implications of Mental Health Services for the Poor in the United States
Answering these questions requires not only studying the ethical implications of neuroscientific discoveries, but also the moral and political questions raised by their use in the formulation of implementation of public policies. Accordingly, I use the ethnographic method to develop a granular understanding of how trauma-informed services and other forms mental health care are deployed in the institutional domain of social services for the poor. My objectives are 1) to nvestigate standardized categories, formal and informal, used by service providers to make sense of their clients’ behaviors and needs. 2) to track how those categories are matched to sanctions or benefits of different kinds, and 3) evalute if they increase poor people's well-being or reduce their autonomy. Since September 2014 I have conducted observation and interviews in a high-poverty city of New Jersey, with both service providers and low-income service recipients. I have attended trainings for social workers, sat in on group therapy sessions and followed low-income people as they navigated different parts of the welfare state.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/empondo