CAMHRA announces the winners of the Annual Book Prize 2026
In 2026 CAMHRA invited book manuscripts that speak to the theme of Anthropological Illuminations in the Study of Mental Health and Illness.
Prior to our Annual Lecture, CAMHRA was delighted to present the winner of the inaugural CAMHRA Book Prize, awarded under the theme Anthropological Illuminations in the Study of Mental Health and Illness.
The prize was established to recognise book manuscripts that demonstrate how anthropological methods can illuminate specific puzzles and problems in the study of mental health and illness, offering insights that may be difficult to apprehend through other disciplinary approaches. We were pleased to receive submissions from scholars working across a diverse range of contexts, topics and methodological traditions.
The theme for each year’s CAMHRA Book Prize is set by the Centre’s Annual Lecturer. As CAMHRA’s inaugural Annual Lecturer, Professor Brighu Singh selected the theme for this year’s prize.
CAMHRA would like to warmly congratulate the prize winner, runner-up and honourable mention recipient. Together, these manuscripts exemplify the richness and breadth of contemporary anthropological engagement with mental health and illness. They illuminate the social, historical, political and relational dimensions of mental health while demonstrating the distinctive insights that ethnographic research can bring to conversations across disciplines, practices and settings.
We thank all those who submitted manuscripts to the inaugural competition and look forward to supporting future work that continues to expand the possibilities of anthropology in the study of mental health and illness.
Prize Winner
Unlicensed: How Nepal’s Lay Counsellors are Reimagining Mental Healthcare
by Dr Liana Chase, Parbati Shrestha, Kripa Sigdel, Dr Sujan Shrestha, Kusumlata Tiwari, Aruna Limbu, and Dr Prasansa Subba
Unlicensed is an ethnography of lay mental health care and frontline service delivery in Nepal, based on fieldwork from 2016–2017 and 2023. The book traverses multiple spaces, from government ministries in Kathmandu to the homes of clients and families in remote parts of Nepal.
When presenting the book, Dr Bhrigupati Singh quoted a passage from the introduction:
“This book holds diverse practices of attending to mental health problems in focus at the same time, from evidence-based treatments to intimate gestures among neighbours and relatives within the ebb and flow of everyday life… As the field of mental healthcare steps into the unknown, frontline ethnographies like this one provide an empirical lantern casting light up ahead.”
The prize committee was particularly struck by the manuscript’s careful attention to the varied forms of care through which mental health support is delivered and sustained, and its ability to move across institutional, community and everyday settings.
An interview with some of the authors of Unlicensed is available to watch here:
Runner-Up
Psychiatric Imaginaries: An Ethnographic History of Illness, Gender and Violence in Lebanon
by Dr Lamia Moghnieh
Building on a multi-disciplinary framework from anthropology, history, and psychology, Psychiatric Imaginaries examines the role of psychiatric expertise in shaping patient and public imaginaries of madness in Lebanon from the late 1930s until present day. Adopting a gendered lens, it approaches psychiatry as a place for the making of the political, intellectual, and social theories of the self, illness and violence. The book places experts debates on diagnosis, institutionalization and global mental health in conversation with public discourses of madness and illness, and with the lifeworlds of patients and therapeutic communities.
Dr Lamia Moghnie
She is a medical anthropologist and mental health practitioner whose research examines the interplay between psychiatry and social understandings of self and illness in postcolonial and post-conflict societies across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA/SWANA). Her work explores the relationship between psychiatric knowledge, mental health diagnostics, and patient subjectivities, agencies and narratives.
She received her PhD in Social Work and Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 2016 and is a founding member of Ethnography and Knowledge in the Arab Region, a working group of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) dedicated to the collaborative exploration of critical ethnographic knowledge in, from and about the Arab region.
Honourable Mention
The Dug-Up Heart: Indonesian Nuns, Performing Minds, and the Company You Keep
by Dr Meghan Rose Donnelly
The Dug-Up Heart follows an Indonesian order of Catholic nuns to unearth how people become who they are in the company of others. Inspired by the supportive communal lives that Indonesian nuns build and based on long-term ethnographic research, new creative methods, and innovative reading of anthropological work in subjectivity, religion, and performance, The Dug-Up Heart offers a glimmering solution to how we might live better—together.
Dr Meghan Rose Donnelly
She is an anthropologist of community and religious experience whose research works closely with Indonesian Catholic nuns. Combining deeply embedded participant observation with experimental performance ethnography, she examines questions of self, community and religious life. Her work also explores creative and performance-based approaches to anthropological research and representation.
She is a co-founder of Tiny Human Dramas, a fringe theatre company that creates short plays inspired by anthropological research, and co-organises the Anthropology and Performance reading group at the University of Manchester. She joined the University of Manchester in 2022 after completing her PhD in Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Following the success of the inaugural prize, CAMHRA will run the competition again next year, building on the conversations generated by this year’s Annual Lecture with Professor Clara Han and continuing to support anthropological research that advances new understandings of mental health and illness. More details will follow.