The political philosophy of mental health as a public health issue

Research project description

A PhD position is available at the Group of Humanistic Studies on Science and Technology – Department of Philosophy from the Universitat Autònoma Barcelona under the supervision of Angel Puyol González and Eva Padrosa. We are looking for a highly motivated candidate that will investigate the political philosophy of mental health as a public health issue.

Mental health for all is a public health goal, and public health is not only a medical issue, but also an ethical and political issue that has to do with democratic conceptions of the public good and equity in health, as evidenced by studies on social determinants of mental health currently being carried out in health sociology and social epidemiology.

Until now, ethical issues in mental health have been addressed from ethics or clinical bioethics, but this is insufficient to understand the undeniable political background of public health, especially in relation to mental health, which is inseparable from political philosophy, as the history of madness shows.

Within the framework of our current research project on the ethics and political philosophy of public health, we have opened a line of research on the ethics and political philosophy of mental health as a public health policy. The pre-doc will work on this issue at a European level with the co-direction of the project’s PI (Angel Puyol) and an international expert (Eva Padrosa) in the analysis of the social and political determinants of mental health who has just completed her PhD, which received the greatest academic distinctions with the thesis “Precarious employment and mental health in Europe: Development, validation, and association with mental health of a novel cross-national measure” (2022).

Specifically, the aim of the grant is to analyse at a European level the most common philosophical, ethical and political conflicts in mental health as a public health policy in relation to a) current conceptual debates on mental health and well-being, b) the tension between paternalism and the autonomy and individual freedoms, c) and/or current debates on the criteria of justice with which inequity in mental health should be addressed. It will be especially valued if the thesis is focused on studying the mental health policies of young people and children. The successful candidate will be enrolled in the PhD Philosophy doctoral program at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) in the framework of the TOUCH project. TOUCH (“Towards the next generatiOn of excellent yoUng doctoral researchers on mental health by developing an intersectoral & transdisciplinary approaCH”) is a new excellent doctoral programme co-funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) Actions of the European Commission and led by the UAB for the recruitment and training of 24 doctoral candidates in the field of mental health and wellbeing.

Academic background / Skills

The candidates must fulfil the following eligibility criteria from the EC: Mobility rule: candidates must not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc.) in Spain for more than 12 months in the 36 months immediately preceding the deadline for the programme call. Experience rule: researchers must be doctoral candidates at the date of recruitment, i.e. not already in possession of a doctoral degree at the deadline of the open calls. Researchers who have successfully defended their doctoral thesis but have not yet formally awarded the doctoral degree will not be considered eligible. Candidates must hold a degree that allows admission to the official doctoral programme at UAB.

Additional requirements for a stronger application are:

The position is open to graduate candidates from the fields of philosophy, bioethics, public health or political science and health sociology, but is not excluded from candidates from other disciplines who have a special interest in the ethical and politically critical analysis of mental health as a public health issue.

The candidate must be able to work in a team, to use philosophical and scientific concepts appropriate to the topic of the thesis and to be fluent in English and Spanish or Catalan.

Continuous physical presence at the university is recommended. The thesis must be completed within the duration of the scholarship.

Interested applicants are encouraged to contact the investigators for further information angel.puyol@uab.cat

Research group/s description

The research group GEHUCT (Grup d’Estudis Humanístics sobre la Ciència i la Tecnologia; Humanistic Studies Group on Science and Technology) takes an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of science and its applications. Our topics combine ethics and political philosophy, epistemology and philosophy of science, as well as medicine, especially public health. The current research focuses on the philosophy of public health. Public health contains different philosophical problems that we treat interdisciplinary through workshops, congresses, debates with experts in public health and epidemiology, and indexed publications. The GEHUCT research group has been funded in the last three calls for proposals from the SGR. Currently, the group is recognised by the Generalitat de Catalunya as a consolidated research group and funded with 40,000 euros (2021SGR517).