Aaron Neiman

My doctoral research focuses on the growing use of online interventions to treat mental illness in Australia. I am especially interested in the social, political, and economic implications of “e-mental health,” funded by the Australian government as a public health strategy to treat “mild-to-moderate” anxiety and depression and free up scarce in-person resources. My research asks how this trend informs popular and scientific distinctions between pathological mental illness and “normal” psychic distress.

Conducting fieldwork with those who research, design, market, and use these interventions, I seek to understand how the notion of the therapeutic alliance is redefined, challenged, or reinforced in these new encounters between people and computers.

Before coming to Stanford, I received my BA in the Anthropology of Science and Medicine from Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.