Nikita Kaur Simpson, "Tension: Mental Distress and Embodied Inequality in the Western Himalayas" (Duke UP, 2026)

In this episode of New Books in Environmental Studies, Dr. Miranda Melcher interviews Dr. Nikita Kaur Simpson about her 2026 book, *Tension: Mental Distress and Embodied Inequality in the Western Himalayas*. Simpson, a medical anthropologist at SOAS, University of London, draws on decades of ethnographic fieldwork in the Doloda Mountains to explore how the term 'tension'—used ubiquitously by the Gadis people—functions as a lived, embodied experience of mental distress shaped by gender, caste, class, and structural shifts in livelihood. Rather than a clinical symptom, tension emerges as a relational and sensory phenomenon, expressing the cumulative strain of changing land use, urbanization, and patriarchal expectations. Simpson reveals how distress is not isolated but permeates homes, bodies, and communities, often absorbed disproportionately by women and lower-caste individuals. She emphasizes that tension is not causally reducible to one factor but is instead a dynamic, polysemic language through which people make sense of intersecting inequalities. The book also explores how forms of sharing—through friendship, return to natal homes, or imaginal encounters like visits from a 'jungle raja'—offer ways to manage distress, while the breakdown of such relational structures can lead to stigmatization and marginalization, as seen in the case of a woman labeled 'mad' for deviating from kinship norms. Simpson concludes by calling for a global rethinking of mental health that centers local theories of distress and acknowledges the deep entanglement of body, environment, and power. Listeners are invited to reflect on how the concept of tension might resonate beyond the Himalayas, especially in contexts of ecological anxiety, housing precarity, and postcolonial mental health. Simpson’s current work extends this framework to racialized housing experiences in the UK and Australia, and to the historical emergence of global mental health discourse in the mid-20th century. The episode underscores anthropology’s unique capacity to capture the complexity, uncertainty, and relationality of distress—offering a powerful counter-narrative to Western biomedical models that prioritize linear causality and individual pathology.