Women are having a moment. At President Trump’s State of the Union address, Democratic women wore white as a nod to suffragists and female leadership, and Nancy Pelosi’s backclap went viral. At the 2019 Oscars, women of color made history, receiving an unprecedented number of awards, and Period. End of Sentence. (2018),a film about menstruation in rural India,won best …
Tag Archives: Culture and Mental Health
Conjuring Madness: Self/Non Self and Mental Illness in Post-Apartheid Namibia
Il convient plutot de s’attacher à ce que signifie ȇtre un homme, avant de problématiser la folie en terms de santé et maladie, Ludwig Binswanger, Le Rȇve et l’Existence (1954)
On a cold winter morning I walked on Independence Avenue, Windhoek’s main thoroughfare in the heart of the capital’s central business district, with M. …
Luhrmann and Marrow’s Our Most Troubling Madness
Our Most Troubling Madness: Case Studies in Schizophrenia Across Cultures
T.M. Luhrmann and Jocelyn Marrow, editors
University of California Press, 2016, 304 pages
A key premise of this volume of ethnographic case studies is that schizophrenia, or the various conditions we label as schizophrenia and related psychoses, varies in crucial ways in terms of experience, prognosis and outcome …
Janis H. Jenkins’ “Extraordinary Conditions: Culture and Experience in Mental Illness”
Extraordinary Conditions: Culture and Experience in Mental Illness
Janis H. Jenkins
University of California Press, 2015, 343 pages
It has been a privilege, through reading Extraordinary Conditions, to come into contact with a writer and practitioner of extraordinary compassion. The book bears witness to a process of open-ended interviewing that contributed to presenting the lives and experiences of Jenkins’ …
Graphic Medicine and Medical Anthropology
This article is part of the series: Inhabitable Worlds
Introduction
When I began my graphic memoir series, Aliceheimers, it focused just on life with my mother Alice before and during dementia. But the revelatory insight that she has retained, even during the late stages of this sickness, has led me to sometimes let the character “Alice” metamorphose into an odd sort of sage. Here, she and I explore …
Kelly Ray Knight’s addicted.pregnant.poor
Duke University Press, 2015, 328 pages
addicted.pregnant.poor is the sort of ethnography you start reading and don’t put down again until it’s finished. From its opening pages—where Knight recounts the story of trying to get into the hotel room of Ramona, her extremely high, heavily pregnant and possibly comatose informant—to the last, this is a …