Community, Deinstitutionalisation, and the Politics of Care in Latin America
2026 Speaker Series: "Who is the Provider?"
Who provides mental health support, and in what contexts?
This monthly virtual series convenes practitioners, researchers, policymakers, and community leaders to examine how mental health care is delivered across cultures, systems, and resource settings.
Community, Deinstitutionalisation, and the Politics of Care in Latin America
This session approaches the question “who is the provider?” from a sociological and historical perspective. Drawing on research from the Transitions project, it explores how processes of psychiatric deinstitutionalisation in South America have reshaped ideas of care, responsibility, and expertise. Rather than focusing solely on specialist professionals, the presentation examines how care becomes distributed across families, communities, peer workers, and under-resourced public systems, and how this redistribution can be both emancipatory and politically fraught. The talk reflects on what these experiences reveal about the global circulation of community mental health models and the tensions between rights-based reform and material constraints.
Cristian Montenegro, PhD
Cristian Montenegro, PhD
Cristian Montenegro is a medical sociologist and Senior Lecturer in Critical Global Health at King’s College London. His research examines the politics of mental health policy and psychiatric reform, with a particular focus on Latin America. He is Principal Investigator of Transitions: The Ethics and Politics of Psychiatric Deinstitutionalisation in South America, a Wellcome-funded project exploring historical and contemporary transformations of mental health systems in Chile and Brazil. His work engages debates in global mental health, community care, lived experience, and the role of social sciences in health policy.
