Henry Cowles

Henry Cowles will spend his year at CASBS writing a history of mental healthcare in the United States. Framed around the six evidence-based therapies for anxiety and depression in use today, the project reveals a fundamental pattern in how mental illness has been understood and treated from the rise of the asylum to the ascendence of the app. The pattern is deceptively simple: time and again, providers found ways to help patients but struggled to explain why their tools seemed to work. Rather than see this approach as a sign of psychiatry's backwardness, the project argues that two centuries of failing to rid society of anxiety and depression has transformed scientific hubris into a new form of clinical humility. Today, more providers are letting their patients see the uncertainty that has always characterized mental healthcare, they are turning a frustrating, often violent history into something that always seemed more dream than reality: progress. 

Cowles is a scholar of science studies based at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Scientific Method: An Evolution of Thinking from Darwin to Dewey (Harvard University Press, 2020) as well as academic articles on topics ranging from extinction to attention. In addition to the book on mental healthcare, Cowles is in the beginning stages of a project that retells the history of American political economy through efforts to study, control, and monetize personal habits, as well as a collaborative history of psychohistory and a tarot deck that builds divinatory practices out of concepts in science studies.