My research explores the social, cultural, historical, and scientific context of treatment practices for severe mental illness. Early in my research career, I focused on psychiatric treatment practices in the first half of the twentieth century. Over the last decade, my research increasingly shifted towards examining present practices and policies and, for the last five years or so, has focused on contemporary mental health services for severe mental illness.

Though I use a variety of methods, ranging from historical and ethnographic approaches to quantitative and survey-based methods, there is a fundamental continuity to my research. Specifically, I have aimed to understand the ways in which sociocultural values shape and become incorporated into clinical and scientific practices. Given that psychiatric illness is as much a disease of an individual’s social world as it is of his/her psychological and biological worlds, disentangling the social and cultural values that shape care and science has policy and clinical implications. Viewing the world through the bifocal lenses of a historian and a psychiatrist, I see my work as contributing to a broader conversation about the relationships between culture, history, medicine, and science on the one hand, and, on the other hand, providing clinicians and policy makers with alternative (and hopefully useful) ways to care for and treat those who suffer from severe mental illness.