Mad in America: Rethinking Mental Health

Ian Tucker is a professor and director of impact and innovation in the school of psychology at the University of East London. His expertise is in digital media, emotion, and mental health, he has published over 45 articles and book chapters and has a monograph book entitled Social Psychology of Emotion. He is currently authoring an Emotion in the Digital Age monograph for Routledge's Studies in Science, Technology, and Society series while working on several projects involving technology and mental health. 

In this interview, we discuss how Ian became interested in studying relationships between technology, emotion, and mental health. He addresses some limitations of traditional psychological approaches to these topics and overviews some of his main areas of concern with how digital technology is being used to track people’s emotions and regulate their mental health.

Drawing on philosophers like Gilbert Simondon and Henri Bergson, Ian also explores how digital technologies are being used within peer-to-peer communities to create information archives about experiences with distress and medication in ways that offer collective support.