Reconfiguring Psy Expertise in the Digital Age: Two Cases from India

Abstract

Mental health platforms and apps provide technologies and techniques for self-work, diagnosis, and management of everyday crises. Therapeutic interventions designed to work outside the clinic, they distribute and reconfigure psy expertise. Using the cases of a chatbot-based mental health app and a digital mental health platform, both developed in Bengaluru, India, this article ethnographically attends to new forms of expertise that emerge within digital mental health ecologies. What does it mean when software specialists, AI programmers, or conversational designers emerge as novel experts in mental health care, along with psychologists? How do they build on or depart from more conventional forms of expertise? How is psy expertise enacted in these spaces? Psy technologists, I argue, engage conventional psy expertise, even while establishing their psy technological expertise as alternative, sometimes even superior, ways of responding to emotional crises and mental distress. I first turn to the ways psy technologists conceive of mental health as a technical problem, reconfiguring mental health expertise. Next, I delineate some of the practices through which they enact expertise: engaging (and contesting) psychological expertise and conducting clinical trials. Finally, I investigate what it means to care for mental health digitally.

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