A Research Agenda for Biomedicine and Society

Abstract Digital artefacts and infrastructures have been presented as ever more urgent and necessary for mental health research and practice. Among other endeavours within the evolving and multifaceted field of digital health, telemedicine and mobile health have formed particular foci of promissory, expectational discourse regarding the improvement of epistemic and clinical work in psychiatry (and mental health more generally). These discourses rehearse, and perhaps even contribute to reorganising, multivalent ontologies of distress that interpolate varied notions of the neurobiological, the psychological, and the social. In this chapter, we contextualise and historicise some of these developments, attending to the enactment of the multimodal field of ‘digital mental health’. Entwined within the deployment of expectational discourses are particular framings of the novelty of digital mental health interventions and their implications, and the configuration of professional and indeed economic values.