Dr Dominique Béhague

Dr Dominique Béhague is a social anthropologist trained at Bryn Mawr College in the US (1991 – BA, 1992 – MA) and McGill University in Canada (2004 – PhD). Specialising in the ethnography of Brazil and the anthropology of health and biomedicine, she has developed specific interests in psychiatry, reproductive health and the politics of global health research.

In 2009, she completed a MSc in Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) in an effort to support her long-standing engagement with interdisciplinary research and to complement her growing interest in the anthropology of statistical and 'qualitative' forms of reasoning in global health.

She joined King’s on a fractional appointment as a Senior Lecturer in Global Mental Health in the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine. She works mainly on global mental health, both in Brazil and in an international context, consolidating links with the Institute of Psychiatry, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and with the newly expanded Centre for Medicine, Health and Society, headed by Professor Jonathan Metzl at Vanderbilt University, where she is currently Associate Professor.

Prior to coming to King’s, Dominique was Senior Lecturer in the Anthropology Department at Brunel University and Lecturer at the LSHTM, where she currently holds an Honorary Lecturership.

Research

Dominique’s main area of research is a direct outgrowth of her long-term research experience in Southern Brazil and is a collaborative project with the Department of Social Medicine at the Federal University of Pelotas and the LSHTM.

Using long-term ethnographic methods and anthropologically-informed epidemiological surveys, the most recent phase of this project explores how the medicalisation of 'adolescence' has been shaped by health care reform, the governance of health and economic inequities, and the psychiatric de-institutionalisation movement.

The study has followed the lives of a core group of young people, participants of the ongoing 1982 Pelotas birth cohort study, from the time these youth were 15 years of age up until their 25th birthday (1997-2007).

Dominique is completing a manuscript based on this material, entitled 'Troubled teens: psychiatry and the shaping of adolescence in the wake of Brazil’s new democracy.'

Further details

See Dominique's research profile