Psychiatric anthropology Research Papers

'Strangers amongst us. Migrants and ethnic minorities in Maandblad Geestelijke volksgezondheid [Dutch mental health monthly], 1946-1991' This article reviews and analyses the writings in MGv ["Maandblad Geestelijke volksgezondheid"; Dutch... more

The relationship between architecture and subjectivity is evaluated through the lens of two psychiatric centers in Maryland which incorporated shopping malls into their design.

[AMAZON LINK BELOW TO BOOK ITSELF -- TOC and book summary in downloadable .pdf] According to the poet Elias Canetti, "All the things one has forgotten / scream for help in dreams." To the ancient Egyptians they were prophecies, and... more

[AMAZON LINK BELOW TO BOOK ITSELF
-- TOC and book summary in downloadable .pdf]
According to the poet Elias Canetti, "All the things one has forgotten / scream for help in dreams." To the ancient Egyptians they were prophecies, and in world folklore they have often marked visitations from the dead. For Freud they were expressions of "wish fulfillment," and for Jung, symbolic representations of mythical archetypes. Although there is still much disagreement about the significance and function of dreams, they seem to serve as a barometer of current mind and body states.

In this volume, Deirdre Barrett brings together the study of dreams and the psychology of trauma. She has called on a distinguished group of psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers--among them Rosalind Cartwright, Robert J. Lifton, and Oliver Sacks--to consider how trauma shapes dreaming and what the dreaming mind might reveal about trauma. The book focuses on catastrophic events, such as combat, political torture, natural disasters, and rape. The lasting effects of childhood trauma, such as sexual abuse or severe burns, on personality formation, the nature of memories of early trauma, and the development of defenses related to amnesia and dissociation are all considered. The book also takes up trauma and adult dreams, including Vietnam veterans and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Holocaust survivors and perpetrators, rape victims, and firestorm survivors. Finally, this volume concludes with a look at the potential "traumas of normal life," such as divorce, bereavement, and life-threatening illness, and the role of dreams in working through normal grief and loss.

Taken together, these diverse perspectives illuminate the universal and the particular effects of traumatic experience. For physicians and clinicians, determining the etiology of nightmares offers valuable diagnostic and therapeutic insights for individual treatment. This book provides a way of juxtaposing the research in the separate fields of trauma and dreams, and learning from their discoveries.

This article focuses on the psychotherapy debate in China that was triggered by the country’s mental health legislation. Seeing the release of the draft Mental Health Law in 2011 as a “diagnostic event” (Moore in Am Ethnol 14(4):727–736,... more

Oaxaca is known for many things--its indigenous groups, archaeological sites, crafts, and textiles--but not for mental health care. When one talks with Oaxacans about mental health, most say it's a taboo topic and that people there think... more

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- by Whitney L Duncan
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- 16
  Psychology, Psychiatry, Anthropology, Psychological Anthropology

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- by Deirdre Barrett
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- 385
  Philology, Neuroscience, Psychology, Abnormal Psychology

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- by Deirdre Barrett
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- 356
  Creative Writing, Neuroscience, Psychology, Abnormal Psychology

Anthropology and psychiatry have long shared common intellectual and scientific ground. Both are interested in human beings, the societies within which they live and their behaviours. A key starting difference between the two is... more

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- by Deirdre Barrett
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- 327
  Neuroscience, Cultural Studies, Media Sociology, Psychology

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- by Deirdre Barrett
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- 353
  Neuroscience, Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, Applied Psychology

The dominant modalities of treatment for alcoholism in Russia are suggestion-based methods developed by narcology—the subspecialty of Russian psychiatry which deals with addiction. A particularly popular method is the use of disulfiram—an... more

""In recent decades, human experience has become focus or frame for a wide variety of projects in psychological anthropology and beyond. Like 'culture,' which it arguably seeks to either qualify or displace, the concept of 'experience'... more

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- by Deirdre Barrett
- •
- 309
  Neuroscience, Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, Applied Psychology

You did your undergraduate work at Stanford where you mainly studied the humanities and social sciences. Why did you make the choice to go to medical school after this? I don't know if I can actually give you an explanation for this. When... more

Comparing perspectives of psychiatrists, Navajo healers, and Navajo patients...

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- by Rachel Gomme
- •
- 10
  Sociology, Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry, Anthropology

In this article, we describe reluctant mothers on the brink of accepting autism spectrum disorder (ASD) as a diagnosis for their children, but caught in a web of social meanings that push them to resist it. We argue that several tensions... more

Since the turn of the century, China has witnessed an unprecedented growth in mental health services, an area that received little attention from the state or society in the first two decades of the economic reform. With the advance of a... more

Since the turn of the century, China has witnessed an unprecedented growth in mental health services, an area that received little attention from the state or society in the first two decades of the economic reform. With the advance of a state-initiated reform that focuses on the public psychiatric system, and a psychotherapy boom that caters to the middle-class populations in cities, the gloomy picture witnessed by pioneering scholars like Arthur Kleinman, Veronica Pearson, Michael Phillips, and Sing Lee in the 1980s and 1990s has slowly receded from view. Looming on the horizon is a vibrant, dynamic, and complicated scene awaiting the investigation of a new generation of researchers. Published in 2017, Jie Yang's Mental Health in China is a timely addition to the inchoate scholarship on this evolving landscape. Based on a review of academic and popular literature and the author's fieldwork experiences, the book offers a concise and comprehensive introduction to mental health in China today. This admirable work comes with an insightful frame-what Yang calls "therapeutic governance"-that purports to explain the wide range of phenomena described in the book. Jie Yang is a cultural anthropologist based at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Initially trained as a linguistic anthropologist, she turned to mental health issues with the arrival of the great transformations mentioned above, yet her works always show a keen sensitivity to language and its permutations. Her first book, Unknotting the Heart: Unemployment and Therapeutic Governance in China, won the Society for East Asian Anthropology's Francis L. K. Hsu Prize in 2016. Based on a decade-long period of research that commenced in the early 2000s on the outskirts of Beijing, it examines how the state sets up counselling services to alleviate the suffering and grievances of former state-owned enterprise (SOE) workers, which constitutes a more benevolent mode of governing. After that, Yang embarked on another major project on "officials' heartache" (guan xinbing)-depression and suicide in China's civil service system-that involves fieldwork in Shandong and Beijing. These two projects provide a solid experiential ground and considerable firsthand material for the current book. Mental Health in China includes seven chapters, sandwiched between an introduction and a conclusion. The introduction brings two recent developments to the fore: a mental health crisis, as shown in the prevalence of mental disorders, and the burgeoning of both popular and professional psychology. It also introduces the overarching concept of therapeutic governance that derives from the scholarship inspired by French philosopher Michel Foucault.

This article takes the ethnographic case of Family Constellations therapy in Oaxaca, Mexico, to demonstrate how a nonnative therapeutic practice articulates with local cultural frameworks to foster novel forms of therapeutic experience... more

Extending classic anthropological “idioms of distress” research, we argue that intensive online videogame involvement is better conceptualized as a new global idiom, not only of distress but also of wellness, especially for emerging... more

El campo de la salud mental ha sido hasta el tiempo presente una de las áreas de formación y práctica clínica abordadas con menor profundidad en el currículum de pregrado de los profesionales de la salud. Reducida en la enseñanza de la... more

El campo de la salud mental ha sido hasta el tiempo presente una de las áreas de formación y práctica clínica abordadas con menor profundidad en el currículum de pregrado de los profesionales de la salud. Reducida en la enseñanza de la medicina al dominio de la especialidad de la psiquiatría, la salud mental no ha sido interrogada en sus fundamentos epistémicos y políticos. En otros términos, no se ha puesto a prueba qué comprendemos por salud mental y en base a cuáles argumentos sostenemos la delimitación de su campo de acción. De este modo, antes de plantear una definición normativa de salud mental, se busca indagar en algunas aproximaciones que han explorado teórica y empíricamente las enfermedades mentales desde su contexto social, cultural, político e histórico. Sin pretender una revisión exhaustiva de las teorías y líneas de investigación desarrolladas, el objetivo principal es dar cuenta de los principales conceptos e ilustrar la complejidad de un campo que requiere aún de mayor profundización.

Fe de Erratas:
Lecturas sugeridas
Beneduce, Roberto (2006). Enfermedad, persona y saberes de la curación. Entre la cultura y la historia, Anales de Antropología 40 (I): 77-131.
De Martino, Ernesto (1961). La terra del rimorso, Il Saggiatore, Milán [La tierra del remordimiento, Bellaterra, Barcelona, 1999].
Martínez, Ángel (2000). What’s behind the symptom? On psychiatric observation and anthropological understanding, Harwood Academic Publishers, Amsterdam.
Martínez, Ángel (2006). Cuando las hormigas corretean por el cerebro: retos y realidades de la psiquiatría cultural, Cadernos de Saúde Pública 22 (11): 2269-2280.
Martínez Ángel, Gemma Orobitg y Josep Comelles (2000). “Antropología y Psiquiatría. Una genealogía sobre la cultura, el saber y la alteridad” en Emilio González y Josep Comelles (comps.), Psiquiatría transcultural, Asociación Española de Neuropsiquiatría, Serie Estudios 25, Madrid, pp. 117-241.
Rechtman, Richard (2004). El enfoque multicultural en salud mental: una mirada crítica, Quadern CAPS 32: 24-30.

Abstract: We present a perspective to analyze mental health without either a) imposing Western illness categories or b) adopting local or “native” categories of mental distress. Our approach takes as axiomatic only that locals within any... more

Abstract: We present a perspective to analyze mental health without either a) imposing Western illness categories or b) adopting local or “native” categories of mental distress. Our approach takes as axiomatic only that locals within any culture share a cognitive and verbal lexicon of salient positive and negative emotional experiences, which an appropriate and repeatable set of ethnographic procedures can elicit. Our approach is provisionally agnostic with respect to either Western or native nosological categories, and instead focuses on persons’ relative frequency of experiencing emotions. Putting this perspective into practice in India, our ethnographic fieldwork (2006-2014) and survey analysis (N=219) resulted in a 40-item Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS), which we used to assess the mental well-being of Indigenous persons (the tribal Sahariya) in the Indian states of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. Generated via standard cognitive anthropological procedures that can be replicated elsewhere, measures such as this possess features of psychiatric scales favored by leaders in global mental health initiatives. Though not capturing locally named distress syndromes, our scale is nonetheless sensitive to local emotional experiences, frames of meaning, and “idioms of distress.” By sharing traits of both global and also locally-derived diagnoses, approaches like ours can help identify synergies between them. For example, employing data reduction techniques such as factor analysis—where diagnostic and screening categories emerge inductively ex post facto from emotional symptom clusters, rather than being deduced or assigned a priori by either global mental health experts or locals themselves—reveals hidden overlaps between local wellness idioms and global ones. Practically speaking, our perspective, which assesses both emotional frailty and also potential sources of emotional resilience and balance, while eschewing all named illness categories, can be deployed in mental health initiatives in ways that minimize stigma and increase both the acceptability and validity of assessment instruments.

Abstrak Pasung adalah bentuk pengekangan fisik terhadap orang dengan hendaya kejiwaan di Indonesia. Penelitian ini berfokus memahami keputusan pemasungan kembali oleh keluarga kepada Orang Dengan Gangguan Jiwa (ODGJ) yang telah keluar... more

Abstrak Pasung adalah bentuk pengekangan fisik terhadap orang dengan hendaya kejiwaan di Indonesia. Penelitian ini berfokus memahami keputusan pemasungan kembali oleh keluarga kepada Orang Dengan Gangguan Jiwa (ODGJ) yang telah keluar dari perawatan di RSJ (eks pasien). Dengan menggunakan metode studi kasus tunggal, penelitian ini melibatkan subjek dan informan sebanyak lima orang. Subjek terdiri dari tiga anggota keluarga sebagai caregiver dan informan berasal kader Dinas Sosial yang melakukan pendampingan, serta tetangga yang mengetahui keberadaan subjek kasus yang dipasung. Data dikumpulkan melalui wawancara, observasi, FGD, dan dokumen subjek. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan pemasungan adalah upaya perlindungan tehadap ODGJ dan opsi terakhir keluarga. Paparan penelitian dalam kronologi periode sebelum dipasung, ketika dipasung, periode lepas-pasung, periode pengobatan alternatif, dan periode pemasungan kembali. Periode upaya pengobatan dijalani subjek kasus dalam waktu yang relatif singkat, sehingga pasca menjadi eks pasien RSJ, subjek kasus kembali dipasung. Analisis pengambilan keputusan caregiver mempertimbangkan sosiokultural. Coping terhadap stres perawatan keluarga dilakukan secara religious-focused, yakni mengedepankan ibadah, ikhlas, ikhtiar, serta meyakini bahwa ada maksud di balik cobaan. Keluarga melakukan keterbukaan dan tidak terpapar stigma yang beredar di masyarakat. Lingkungan sosial cenderung mendukung keputusan keluarga selagi masih bisa merawat keberadaan ODGJ meski dengan cara dipasung. Abstract Pasung is the form of physical restraint or confinement toward mentally disabled people in Indonesia. This study focuses on understanding the decision of reconfinement toward the Persons With Mental Illness (PWMI) who have been discharged from mental hospital (ex-patient). By using a single case study, this study involves five subjects and informants. The subjects from three members of the family as the caregivers, while the informants from Social Service who provides guidance, and a neighbor who know where the subject of the case is confined. The data were collected through interviews, observation, FGD, and document analysis. The results showed that the reconfinement towards PWMI is the form of protection and the last option. Research explanation consists of chronology of the periods before in pasung, while in pasung, off-pasung period, alternative treatment period, and the period of reconfinement. The treatment is undertaken by the subject in a short time period so that the ex-patient be reconfined. The analysis of decision-making considers the sociocultural aspect from the caregivers. Caregivers " coping stress is done in religious-focused, namely promoting worship, acceptance, efforts, and believes that there is a purpose behind the obstacles. The family discloses toward society and not exposed by the stigma. The social environment tends to support the decision of the family while they can take care of the presence of PWMI though with pasung form. PENDAHULUAN Persoalan kesehatan jiwa adalah bagian tidak terpisahkan dari kesehatan masyarakat. Kesehatan jiwa merupakan bagian integral yang diperhatikan oleh negara karena memengaruhi angka kesehatan dan kondisi sosial masyarakat. Tidak dapat dipungkiri, perlindungan terhadap kesehatan jiwa juga termasuk di dalam segmentasi Hak Asasi Manusia (HAM). Hal tersebut didukung oleh lembaga Perserikatan Bangsa-Bangsa (PBB) melalui World Health Organization

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- by Aldani Wijayanti and +1
  Achmad M. Akung
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- 6
  Clinical Psychology, Social Psychology, Mental Health, Psychiatric & Mental Health Nursing

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- by Deirdre Barrett
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- 450
  Neuroscience, Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, Applied Psychology

The phenomenon of self-cutting has attracted increasing attention in scholarly and popular venues. Most of the literature is written from clinical, historical, or psychometric standpoints, and what has been missing is an ethnographic... more

A critique of the 2014 APA Division 30 Definition of Hypnosis

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- by Deirdre Barrett
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- 375
  Neuroscience, Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, Applied Psychology

The proposed study would examine how displacement of native Sahariyas from their forest homes in the Kuno Wildlife Sanctuary of central India affects their health and well-being. The work proceeds from a biocultural perspective, and would... more

The proposed study would examine how displacement of native Sahariyas from their forest homes in the Kuno Wildlife Sanctuary of central India affects their health and well-being. The work proceeds from a biocultural perspective, and would investigate relationships between stress and wellness among Sahariyas residing near the core of the Sanctuary, who have maintained access to forests and their attendant economic and cultural resources, as compared to stress and wellness relationships among Sahariyas from nearly identical village settings, who have been displaced over the last twelve years to facilitate future rebuilding of an Asiatic population of lions.
A particular focus of the study would be to compare how spiritually-based Sahariya ethnomedicine may provide villagers in these different contexts with a source of health resiliency, allowing them to manage more effectively the disruptions associated with displacement, and thus better able to resist illness in the first place, to recover more quickly when they do experience distress, and even to more readily reach higher states of positive health and well-being. The mechanism supposed here is that states of calm and relaxation associated with involvement in religiously-informed ethnomedicine enhance emotional resilience, protecting individuals from stress-related mental disorders such as anxiety and depression, and instilling happiness and life satisfaction. An innovative feature of the proposed work is the use of newly developed minimally-invasive measures of stress hormones (cortisol and oxytocin) that can be implemented in the field by the collection of salivary samples. These data would enable an examination of how villagers’ physical states of stress and health change in relation to participation in religious rituals. This field experiment would be accompanied by ethnography and health surveys, helping further to clarify potential relationships between religion, stress, and well-being in such contexts of social dislocation.

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- by Yannis Gansel
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- 5
  Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry, Anthropology, Trauma Studies

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- by Fernando Rivera
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- 17
  Psychology, Cognitive Science, Cultural Psychology, Psychopathology

This paper explores the content of the somniloquies of Dion McGregor, the most extensive sleep talker ever recorded, and compares these with dream content from normative male dreams on the Hall and van de Castle Content Scales (1966) and... more

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- by Deirdre Barrett
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- 285
  Languages, Neuroscience, Psychology, Abnormal Psychology

In this article, I call for enlarging the conceptual terrain for viewing local biological expressions of illness. To date, a speciﬁc DNA sequence pattern, called “the Senegalese sickle cell haplotype,” has enjoyed extraordinary purchase... more

On July 30, 1989, less than two months after the first partly free elections which showed nearly unanimous support for the democratic opposition and became a milestone in the rapid dismantling of state socialism in Poland, the main... more

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- by Deirdre Barrett
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- 341
  Neuroscience, Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, Applied Psychology

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- by Deirdre Barrett
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- 274
  Neuroscience, Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, Applied Psychology

In the legal context, psychiatric evaluations are subject to controversy, considered as either indispensable or flawed, and yet rarely studied in their own right. This article puts forward a political anthropology of mental healthcare... more

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- by Samuel LÉZÉ
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- 23
  Sociology, Criminology, Sociology Of Deviance, Law

Tracing the historical trajectories of war traumatology in Turkey, this paper develops a genealogy of the recent institutionalization of the diagnostic category of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in Turkish military psychiatry and... more

Working through the lens of Donna Haraway's cyborg theory and directed at the example of Prozac, I address the dramatic rise of new technoscience in medicine and psychiatry. Haraway's cyborg theory insists on a conceptualization and a... more

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- by Bradley Lewis
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- 3
  Cultural Studies, Cyborg Theory, Psychiatric anthropology

This paper argues in favor of two related theses. First, due to a fundamental, biologically grounded world-openness, human culture is a biological imperative. As both biology and culture evolve historically, cultures rise and fall and the... more

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- by Michael A Schwartz and +1
  Marcin Moskalewicz
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- 14
  Evolutionary Psychology, Human Evolution, Diversity, Social and Cultural Anthropology

In this paper, we focus on the diversity of scientific approaches in French psychiatry, using several concepts inspired by the philosophy of sciences. The feeling of an internal crisis, regularly expressed on a public stage, alongside... more

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- by Yannis Gansel
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- 7
  Neuroscience, Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry, Epistemology

Paper prepared for the conference “Normale ou ordinaire, accomplie ou autonome? La vie et ses formes pour les personnes souffrant d’un trouble mental chronique dans et après la psychiatrie” The Portuguese national mental health plan... more

Paper prepared for the conference “Normale ou ordinaire, accomplie ou autonome? La vie et ses formes pour les personnes souffrant d’un trouble mental chronique dans et après la psychiatrie”

The Portuguese national mental health plan (NMHP), approved in 2008, aimed, among other priorities, at defining best practices in long-term mental healthcare, with a specific focus in rehabilitation and deinstitutionalization. One year after the promulgation of the plan, a severe economic recession gained momentum in the country, resulting in austerity measures with cuts in the health budget and, at the same time, a decrease in families’ revenues. This study aims at understanding how the NMHP was effectively put in practice in such adverse circumstances and the consequences of the implementation path to families and carers of the mentally ill.
We first performed an extensive narrative review of policy documents related to the historical context of the NMHP and its implementation process. Secondly, we interviewed professionals and managers of long-term mental health services created under the NMHP, in order to characterise the provision of psychosocial rehabilitation in Lisbon Metropolitan Area.
On the one hand, the development of community-oriented policies was encouraged mainly to avoid the iatrogenic effects of institutionalization and to promote a “recovery” environment. On the other hand, the transference of caring activities to communitarian milieu should be performed carefully to avoid an excess burden for families, from whom a greater involvement is expected in this new model of care.
The analysis of the NMHP context showed a mix of long-term care providers, mostly private not-for-profit, with very different practices and target population. The lack of instruments to stimulate new solidarity associations, to encourage innovation, support management capacity and to ensure participation brought on obstacles to the emergence of new practices and expected advances. The countries’ path dependency and its fragile economic situation, posed great difficulties in the implementation of the plan accordingly to its own guidelines with potentially detrimental consequences on the well-being of families and patients.

Psychopharmaceuticals have become a common means to treat mental distress in diverse contexts around the globe. In the past 20 years, the escalating global influence of biomedicine has led to the increasing presence of... more

Psychological and psychiatric anthropology have long questioned the universality of psychiatric diagnoses, bringing to light the fluidity of mental disorder , and recognizing that the experience and expression of psychopathology is... more

This article examines experiences of returned migrants seeking mental health care at the public psychiatric hospital in Oaxaca, Mexico. Approximately one-third of the hospital’s patients have migration experience, and many return to... more

The article explores the cultural and economic dimensions in di- agnosing depression in Polish psychiatric practice since the systemic trans- formation with a particular focus on strategies used by physicians. Based on ethnographic... more

Psychiatric anthropology

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