Description
This paper addresses the growing interest from governments and their public health institutions in tracking mental health - alongside other health data - during times of crises, e.g. the COVID-19 pandemic, terrorist attacks or natural disasters. We are witnessing a new drive to ‘rapidly identify geographically concentrated emotional reactions after traumatic events’ and to ‘provide a timely flow of intelligence’ on population mental wellbeing which relies on the quantification of mental distress. Mental health surveillance on this scale is usually facilitated through and under the umbrella of public health and there is a growing body of scholarship discussing population wide mental health screening attempts and introducing specific (often automated) public health protocols. Drawing on previous scholarship in global health and international relations (e.g. Howell 2011; Elbe 2010), this paper problematizes automated mental health surveillance as an extension of neoliberal governance to monitor populations’ emotional responses to overlapping and recurrent crises. As such, this paper shows that mental health surveillance and data processing requires close scholarly scrutiny in an age of increased social uncertainty/unrest, where ‘crisis’ can become a signifier for numerous situations and where crises are perpetual, i.e. requiring ongoing surveillance.
