About Us

I’m a qualitative sociologist with a track record of research and professional work on mental health policy. My work broadly concentrates on the exchanges between health and democracy, at the micro (service-user participation and community engagement) and macro-levels (health-related social movements, democratic transitions and health care policy, human rights and grassroots advocacy in health), specifically in South America. I have conducted research on the experiences of caregivers of persons with psychosocial disabilities and their interaction with care providers, the activist practices of mental health service-user and survivors, the political and administrative dimensions of community participation in healthcare policy, the socio-political contexts of psychiatric deinstitutionalization and the social and cultural aspects of early intervention in psychosis. In studying these topics, I have used ethnography, oral history, in-depth interviews, and documentary analysis. I am ethically and politically concerned with justice and equity in global health and with the relevance of culture, context and locality in healthcare research. Currently, I'm working on a sociologically-oriented oral history project centred on the transformation of a large psychiatric hospital in Santiago's outskirts during and after dictatorship (1980-2010). The project reveals that deinstitutionalisation encompasses many subtle changes and tensions invisible to the metrics or progress used to describe health services transformation. In the case of Chile, these changes are shaped by a complex tension between the normative imperatives of "community mental health" and a neoliberal definition of State's responsibilities that reinforced abandonment. I'm a Research Fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health (https://wcceh.org), a researcher at the School of Nursing, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and an at the Millennium Institute for Research on Depression and Personality. I'm a founding member of the Platform for Social Research in Mental Health in Latin America (PLASMA), an Editorial Board Member of Critical Public Health, PLOS Global Public Health and part of Somatosphere's editorial collaborative.