Health Between Bodies: On Belonging and the Transcendence of Individualism

Abstract

This is an anthropological exploration of health measured by degrees of connection. It is situated within a particular cultural moment of a felt epidemic of social disconnection and a parallel epidemic of psychiatric conditions — depression, anxiety, and PTSD, among others. The observed social phenomena are not merely correlated; they share a root. This paper argues that the root of psychiatric suffering, of the conditions mentioned, is sociosomatic, the result of a subjective felt disconnection from community and the visceral aftermath of prolonged unbelonging. Because of the especially pronounced rates of the conditions mentioned that are present within military communities, the veteran serves as a subject and metonym to explore the tension in a human need for belonging, an inherently social imperative, embedded within a Western medical system structured to treat only an individual body. In pathologizing the responses to disconnection, the same system obscures the illness and its cure. Through the framework of re-membering — the process of reintegration into and reconnection with the social body — this paper examines how altered states of consciousness induced by entheogenic substances within ceremonial contexts dissolve the boundaries of separation. Drawing on thirty-seven qualitative interviews conducted in partnership with Heroic Hearts Project UK and King's College London, this thesis traces how entheogenic ‘medicines’ function toward that end. A computational linguistic analysis, applying Natural Language Processing to the aggregate corpus of veteran interviews, extends the subjective narratives grounding the arguments into the quantitative register to measure how the semantic themes of healing organize around agency and community. This exploration is in service of an expanded definition of health and where it can happen, beyond the individual body, nor as an individual feat, but realized between bodies and as something cocreated, continuously, becoming.