Biography
Dr Cristian Montenegro is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. He is also an affiliate of the King's Brazil Institute.
Previously, he was Senior Research Fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter and an Assistant Professor at the School of Nursing, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
Cristian’s work critically examines how values shift in mental health policy at local and international scales, examining how different groups - including service users, policymakers, caregivers and service providers - approach and reinterpret core normative categories such as “human rights”, “community”, “participation” and “democracy”.
His work has contributed to ongoing debates at the intersection of two broad shifts in the politics of knowledge in global mental health:
- The evolving role of service-users and individuals with lived experience in mental health science and policy
- The recognition of the “global south” as a site of intellectual originality and a source of lessons in global health for the wider world.
These interlocked shifts challenge traditional understandings of mental pathology and treatment and the institutions implicated in their global circulation, mostly based in the Global North.
Research
- Social, cultural and political aspects of mental health policy
- Mental health, human rights and democracy
- Health and social movements in the global south
- Social theory in healthcare research
- Engagement and co-production in health research
- Latin American studies
Cristian has 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 in South America, the political and administrative dimensions of community participation in healthcare policy, the political ideologies of public mental health and the social and cultural aspects of early intervention in psychosis. For this, he has used ethnography, oral history, in-depth interviews and documentary analysis. More recently he studied the emergence of informal healthcare responses to police violence in contexts of protest and social upheaval.
Cristian leads "Transitions: The Ethics and Politics of Psychiatric Deinstitutionalization in South America” a 4-year, international project funded by Wellcome Trust's Career Development Award. Focusing on Chile and Brazil, the project approaches psychiatric reform as a politically and ethically complex process, drawing on history, sociology, and international policy studies to unpack how controversies about freedom, autonomy, and coercion have, and continue to be experienced and addressed in the global south.
Teaching
Postgraduate
- 7SSHM605 Critical Global Health