Publications by Author: Good, Byron J.

Quietly, with little apparent notice from even the strongest advocates for global mental health, China is undertaking the world’s largest - and arguably most important - mental health services demonstration project, a project focused on providing comprehensive care for persons with severe mental illnesses. As Professor Ma indicates in her short report, the ‘686 Project’ was launched as part of China’s commitment to rebuild its public health infrastructure following the SARS epidemic, and has now moved beyond the initial pilot phase into a process of scaling up community mental health services throughout the country. China is currently moving toward passage of its first national mental health law, so the project has profound implications for mental health policy in the country. It will also provide useful models for the development of mental health policies in other countries with limited mental health personnel.

In both the Acehnese and Indonesian languages, there is no single lexical term for “nightmare.” And yet findings from a large field research project in Aceh that examined post traumatic experience during Aceh’s nearly 30-year rebellion against the Indonesian state and current mental distress revealed a rich variety of dream narratives that connect directly and indirectly to respondents’ past traumatic experiences. The results reported below suggest that even in a society that has a very different cultural ideology about dreams, where “nightmares” as such are not considered dreams but rather the work of mischievous spirits called jin, they are still a significant part of the trauma process. We argue that it is productive to distinguish between terrifying and repetitive dreams that recreate the traumatic moment and the more ordinary varieties of dreams that Acehnese reported to their interviewers. Nightmares that refer back to conflict events do not appear as an elaborated feature of trauma as the condition is understood by people in Aceh, but when asked further about their dreams, respondents who reported symptoms suggestive of PTSD were more likely to report PTSD-like dreams, memory intrusions that repeat the political violence of the past.

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The essays in this volume reflect on the nature of subjectivity in the diverse places where anthropologists work at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Contributors explore everyday modes of social and psychological experience, the constitution of the subject, and forms of subjection that shape the lives of Basque youth, Indonesian artists, members of nongovernmental HIV/AIDS programs in China and the Republic of Congo, psychiatrists and the mentally ill in Morocco and Ireland, and persons who have suffered trauma or been displaced by violence in the Middle East and in South and Southeast Asia.