Nadia Naomi Mbonde

NADIA MBONDE, then a graduate student at New York University, New York, New York, was approved funding in April 2024 to aid research on “Black Maternal Mental Health: Exploring Lived Experience Narratives Under Conditions of U.S. Bio-Psychiatry,” supervised by Dr. Faye Ginsburg. This project investigates how Black women and birthing people in the United States experience reproductive mental health under intersecting systems of medicine, psychiatry, and racial governance. Based on ethnographic research in New York, Texas, and digital peer support spaces, the project examines how participants navigate diagnosis, stigma, and care within reproductive and psychiatric institutions. The grantee conducted in-depth interviews, engaged in online mental health communities where recording was not permitted, and completed doula training in community-based settings serving low-income clients. The research shows that reproductive mental health is not confined to the postpartum period. Participants described diagnosis as both a necessary pathway to resources and a source of harm that intensifies surveillance and stigma. They often used psychiatric language strategically — embracing labels when needed for services and rejecting them when they felt pathologized. Through these practices, participants generated alternative ways of understanding distress, healing, and kinship that exceed conventional medical frames. This project contributes to anthropology by linking reproductive and psychiatric ethnography through a Black feminist lens and showing how state institutions shape mental health across the reproductive life course. It reframes Black maternal mental health not as an individual deficit, but as a collective struggle for care, dignity, and survival.