Name: Community and Psychiatric Reform in 1970’s Chile (in-person)
Start: 2026-03-25T09:30:00+00:00
End: 2026-03-25T11:00:00+00:00
Location: Practice Suite, 1st Floor, Chrystal Macmillan Building, The University of Edinburgh

$Community and Psychiatric Reform in 1970\u2019s Chile (in-person)$

A talk by Dr. Cristian Montenegro, jointly hosted by the Global Mental Health Collaborative and Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society
About this Event

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Psychiatric reforms and deinstitutionalisation processes of the late twentieth century opened new horizons for thinking about treatment, rights, responsibilities, and the boundaries between social policy and psychiatry. Across different regions, the promise of “community care” emerged as a powerful—if unstable—utopia, redefining what mental health care could and should be.

This talk draws on the Transitions project, a comparative study of psychiatric deinstitutionalisation in South America, to examine how “community” was imagined and operationalised in early reform efforts in Chile during the early 1970s. Based on archival and oral history research, it explores how community functioned as a key semantic and political device under the Popular Unity government: at once normative, organisational, and aspirational.

Rather than treating community as a stable or self-evident space, the talk traces its semantic plasticity across policy documents, experimental service models, and public health imaginaries. In contrast to some European reform trajectories, where community was often framed as a space of liberation from institutional confinement, the Chilean case reveals a conception of community more closely tied to developmentalist logics, prevention, and the traditions of Latin American social medicine, as well as to broader projects of state modernisation.

The presentation will begin with a brief introduction to the Transitions project and its broader aim of historicising contemporary debates on psychiatric reform and global mental health. It will conclude by reflecting on how earlier imaginaries of community continue to shape, and complicate, current discussions of deinstitutionalisation, care, and rights in contexts marked by political instability and chronic underfunding.

Project website: https://transitionsproject.co.uk/en/about

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/transitionsproject

Cristian Montenegro is a medical sociologist and Senior Lecturer in Critical Global Health at King’s College London. His research focuses on the politics of mental health policy and psychiatric reform, with particular attention to Latin America. He has conducted research on service-user activism, the politics of lived experience, and the role of medical professionals in contexts of police violence. He currently leads Transitions: The Ethics and Politics of Psychiatric Deinstitutionalisation in South America, a Wellcome-funded project examining historical and contemporary trajectories of reform in Chile and Brazil.