[Linganth] Joanna Cook on Making a Mindful Nation

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Today on the CaMP, Bingjang Yang interviews Joanna Cook, discussing her
book,
*Making a Mindful Nation: Mental Health and Governance in the Twenty-First
Century. *

www.campanthropology.org

Best,
Ilana

Mindfulness seems to be everywhere—in popular culture, in therapeutic
practice, even in policy discussions. How did mindfulness, an awareness
training practice with roots in Buddhism, come to be viewed as a solution
to problems that range from depression and anxiety to criminal recidivism?
If mindfulness is the answer, asks Joanna Cook, what is the question?
In *Making
a Mindful Nation*, Cook uses the lens of mindfulness to show how
cultivating a relationship with the mind is now central to the ways people
envision mental health. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with patients,
therapists, members of Parliament and political advocates in Britain, Cook
explores how the logics of preventive mental healthcare are incorporated
into people’s relationships with themselves, therapeutic interventions,
structures of governance and political campaigns.

Cook observed mindfulness courses for people suffering from recurrent
depression and anxiety, postgraduate courses for mindfulness-based
therapists, parliamentarians’ mindfulness practice and political advocacy
for mindfulness in public policy. She develops her theoretical argument
through intimate and in-depth stories about people’s lives and their
efforts to navigate the world—whether these involve struggles with mental
health or contributions to evolving political agendas. In doing so, Cook
offers important insights into the social processes by which mental health
is lived, the normative values that inform it and the practices of
self-cultivation by which it is addressed.
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