Tell me about yourself, your background, and how you got interested in anthropology.
I'm Peruvian; I was born and raised there and came to the United States in 2016 to do my master's in Latin American studies at the University of Florida. I did my B.A. in sociology, in Lima. I guess I was always interested in the social sciences. Peru was such a turbulent place politically and socially, a place to understand difference, poverty, and inequality. Of course, back then I didn't use that vocabulary. I wasn't the best student in high school. I was actually quite average, and I didn't think that I would go to college. But my parents, as middle-class doctors, they pushed me to do something. And college was great because I was no longer bored. We were watching films, reading poetry, doing those kinds of unstructured things that in my high school we never did. I guess through those interests there was a sensibility that stuck with me, and I declared my major in social sciences.
I met a great community in Florida. I met Erika, my wife, at the solar eclipse in 2017 — it was cosmic! I enjoy watching people thinking critically and deeply about a topic, and I learned that that is a great skill for research. To talk to people, to try to make an impact in addressing some of the big problems in Peru or Latin America or the world, that seemed quite interesting. I went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to do my Ph.D. I was interested in community mental health reform. In Peru, that was quite new.
Mental health and psychiatry have been part of my life since I can remember because my mother is a psychiatrist. I believe mental health is just another kind of difference that we need to address socially. I mean, sure, there are the brain chemicals and medications, but that's just part of the story. During my years at Chapel Hill, I became really interested in mental health difference, neurodiversity, and disability. And that was excellent but also scary, because very few people in the social sciences in Peru do that. I was forging my own path because there were no pre-established rules. My friends and mentors at Chapel Hill were crucial for the work that I ended up doing and the many challenges of doing a Ph.D. as an international student.
Mental health is a focus of your research. Was that a journey, and how would you describe your primary focus these days?
It's a journey, I think. I wasn't super interested in mental health until I found out that there was this national reform of services that in the United States happened in the '50s and '60s, which led to levels of homelessness or abandonment. In Peru and in other countries, it’s quite different. We deal with folks who have mental health differences [by taking them in] at home, or they become institutionalized. But now this mental health reform is transitioning folks who were institutionalized back into the community.
The context is this mental health reform, but my questions are more geared toward what it means to return to a place, or how family dynamics change [if] you had a family member institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital and now they're coming back. Anthropology is this quest to answer very humane questions, like what is a community? How do we deal with someone who has a mental health difference? How do we, as a society and as individuals, include these folks so they can live as autonomous a life as they can? What does it mean to "recover"?
In the United States, there's a lot of discussion about mental health. It's in the culture — people talk about stress and anxiety; you have celebrities talking about mental health. But in Latin America, there's still a huge stigma. It's being challenged, but it's still present.
I try in my research to include community-engaged efforts, so it's not only about me writing my dissertation but making something of value for the folks that I work with, with help from people in my research in Peru who are clients of mental health services and who are neurodivergent. They know some of the obstacles that a person with a psychosocial disability or with severe mental illness faces. We try to make workshops for these folks [to] navigate the job market. We run workshops about informed consent, which is essential because many folks don't know that they have to agree for certain medications to be provided; sometimes they don’t know how to voice concerns to their health providers. We are trying to map a network of mental health activists in Peru, but also in Latin America because this mental health reform is also happening in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay.
What brought you to the University of Michigan?
I was living and teaching in Pennsylvania through the pandemic. Once I finished, there was this great opportunity called the Michigan Society of Fellows, which allows a recently minted Ph.D. to spend three years with very low teaching, basically to work on articles and other projects and to try and turn their dissertation into a book. [This allows] you time to write and focus on your craft and figure out what the next project is going to be. In my cohort, we have people from Slavic Languages and Literatures, Afroamerican & African Studies, Comparative Literature, Classical Studies, and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. There's the hope that we can create interesting synergies and connections so that we can extend our interests and maybe collaborate on a project. There's a senior fellow who’s doing work with AI and technology, so now I'm thinking about teenagers, cell phones, and mental health, for example. I'm thinking about new projects all the time, but that's the opportunity that I have.
You’re currently working on a book.
It's a book project based on my dissertation. I have to go back to Peru, hopefully next year and the following years, for at least three months per year to visit a psychiatric asylum in the Amazon that I'm obsessed about, or to talk with mental health activists. ... Having this buffer of three years, it's really a luxury.
Do you know what courses you'll be teaching here, or what you're interested in teaching?
In the winter I will be teaching a class called the Anthropology of Mental Health, which I hope will bring students with the curiosity to understand that mental health is more than “your brain has chemicals, and the chemicals are not balanced, and the medication allows for the balance.” Mental health is also a manifestation of inequalities in the world. There's this whole discourse of mindfulness and self-care, for example, but can you tell that to someone who has come to the United States as a refugee? Many inequalities — working two jobs and having kids and not being able to afford that, or losing a job — of course are going to stress people. These things that we call "mental illness" happen mostly to poor individuals and can lead to substance abuse or addiction or eventually to homelessness. It's been shown that homelessness is also linked to other health problems such as HIV or tuberculosis. It's all connected, and if we understand mental health or "madness" as a social thing, we're not neglecting that. There are some genetic factors, but that's not the whole story.
In my previous position I was teaching a class on surveillance and algorithms, which is basically technology and mental health. Students are really feeling pressure to perform their lives as influencers. Political polarization is happening online, and news of mass casualty events also generates a level of distress, especially in teenagers or younger individuals. We see how technology can be detrimental to our well-being. I do think that there might be a way we can use technology to confront those challenges. If I teach another class, it will be something with technology, social media, and mental health.
Any favorite places you've explored in Ann Arbor so far?
The library is always my favorite. There is a Peruvian restaurant I want to go to called Culantro. We live in Ypsilanti. I really like the food in Ypsilanti, especially the Latin American and Caribbean food.
WHAT ARE YOU…
…Reading? The diaries of Franz Kafka. His diaries are fascinating. And for academic reading, I'm reading this book called The Sex Thieves by Julien Bonhomme.
…Watching? We are obsessed with Fargo, the show and the movie. My wife and I are going to start the fifth season. But something that I watch — and I spend too much time and money — is professional wrestling, like WWE, AEW, New Japan Pro Wrestling, and other independent companies. I watch that all the time. It's great because of course it's fake, but it's this opportunity to be silly. I watch that all the time and I buy the figurines.
…Listening to? Right now I'm listening to this ambient artist called Eluvium. It's very calm. But I used to play in a punk band in Peru, so I'm also really into punk.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Professor Villa-Palomino will speak at our upcoming sociocultural anthropology colloquium on Friday, Nov. 1. His talk is titled "Suspicion as Care: Reportage and Accusation in Perú’s Community Mental Health Reform." Click here for details.
Read Julio Villa-Palomino's bio.