Aidan Seale-Feldman

Biography

Aidan Seale-Feldman is a medical anthropologist interested in affliction and its treatments—psychiatric, therapeutic, spiritual, and anthropological. Her research examines novel mental health interventions and intersections of secular and spiritual approaches to affliction and healing. She has spent the past decade conducting in-depth ethnographic research in the Himalayas, a region with a rich tradition of shamanic healing that has recently witnessed the rapid growth of psychiatry, counseling, and new forms of mental health governance. Her current research explores the convergence of psychiatry and religion in the emergent field of psychedelic medicine in the United States.

Dr. Seale-Feldman has published on a range of topics including: disaster and mental health care; gender and psychosomatic disorders; biopolitics and global mental health governance; and the translation of affliction between Indigenous and psychiatric worlds. Her work builds on phenomenological approaches to illness and healing by integrating critical anthropological and philosophical considerations of crisis, care, ethics, and relationality. Her ongoing intellectual project is dedicated to exploring psychic life as cultural, historical, and political form; lived experience; object of intervention; and site of experimentation.

Based on two years of fieldwork in Nepal (2014-2016), Dr. Seale-Feldman’s first book, The Work of Disaster (University of Chicago Press, 2025), examines what disaster generates and the fraught relationship between crisis and care. In 2015, the central region of Nepal was struck by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake and 7.3 magnitude “aftershock.” The disaster claimed the lives of over 9,000 people, left half a million homeless, and inspired a brief shock of humanitarian care for the mental health of Nepali people. Set in the time of the earthquakes, the ethnography moves between Kathmandu NGO offices, steep mountain trails, psychosocial interventions, and earthquake-affected villages as it tells the story of an emergent “mental health crisis” and the forms of care that followed in disaster’s wake. The Work of Disaster reveals the contiguous violence and gentleness of humanitarian encounters, and engages broader debates about worldmaking, biopolitics, and the ethics of care.

In Nepal, Dr. Seale-Feldman has also conducted research on psychosomatic disorders and the problem of “mass hysteria” among teenage girls. Drawing on a symmetrical approach to theory in medical anthropology, her publications place interpretations of “mass hysteria” as psychosomatic expression of unconscious trauma and resistance in dialogue with Nepali analytics of spirit possession. In collaboration with anthropologist Dr. Serena Bindi (Université Paris Cité), Dr. Seale-Feldman is also the Main Project Partner on Phantoms or Fantasies?: Somatic Disorders and Embodied Experiences of Loss in Changing Therapeutic Contexts, supported by the French National Research Agency (ANR). Our project asks how the expansion of global mental health and humanitarian psychosocial interventions are changing experiences of grief and relations with the dead across the Himalayan region.

Dr. Seale-Feldman’s current project, Ethical Substance: Psychedelic Medicine in Times of Social and Spiritual Crisis, builds on her previous work on the introduction of novel mental health interventions by exploring the “psychedelic renaissance” and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy in the United States. While psychiatry is rapidly expanding throughout the Global South, in the Global North increasing dissatisfaction with the efficacy of SSRIs and psychiatric treatment modalities have inspired a flood of new research on psychedelic plant medicine to treat addiction, anxiety, PTSD, and depression. The widespread enthusiasm for psychedelic medicine is striking, especially given that for substances such as psilocybin, therapeutic efficacy is strongly correlated with the presence of “mystical experience.” With support from the John Templeton Foundation, Ethical Substance brings together perspectives in anthropology, psychiatry, philosophy, theology, and religious studies to explore the incorporation of mysticism into the lives of secular Americans and their therapeutic practices.

Dr. Seale-Feldman’s research has been supported by grants from the John Templeton Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, the Foundation for Psychocultural Research, and the UC Chancellor’s Prize, among others. Her work has been published in journals such as Cultural Anthropology, Ethos, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, and the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, and has been featured in public venues such as Somatosphere, The Microdose, Anthropology News, and Cultural Anthropology online. From 2019-2021, she served as co-editor of The Screening Room, an experimental ethnographic film series hosted on the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s Visual and New Media Review.

Since 2018 Dr. Seale-Feldman has been a Research Associate in the Centre d’Anthropologie Culturelle (CANTHEL) at the Université de Paris. Prior to joining the faculty at Notre Dame, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer in Bioethics at the University of Virginia.

New Book: The Work of Disaster: Crisis and Care Along a Himalayan Fault Line

New Article: "Secular Mysticism: Entanglements of Science and Religion in Psychedelic Medicine"