This week we feature two clusters of books, one on depression, the other on voice-hearing, which are at the top of the reading list for Angela Woods, Lecturer in Medical Humanities at Durham University and Co-Director of the Hearing the Voice project. Woods has also reviewed Anne Cvetkovich’s Depression: A Public Feeling for this site.
Ann Cvetkovich, …
A Disability of the Soul:
An Ethnography of Schizophrenia and Mental Illness in Contemporary Japan
by Karen Nakamura
Cornell University Press, 2013
US $24.95, Paperback + DVD
It takes a strong heart and an open mind to study something like schizophrenia. No doubt many anthropologists have taken on this courageous task, many to be eventually rewarded with pieces of …
[This article is being cross-posted at the blogs of the Foundation for Psychocultural Research (FPR) and the FPR-UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, Development and Mental Health (CBDMH). Thanks to the FPR’s Constance Cummings for sharing this post with Somatosphere].
Science writer Karen A. Frenkel interviews anthropologist Karen Nakamura for the FPR.
Karen Nakamura is Associate Professor of Anthropology and …
Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience
Harvard University Press, 2013.
688pp., US $45.00, hardcover
According to Liah Greenfeld, author of Mind, Modernity, Madness, “culture is an empirical reality of the first order in human life – that it, in the most profound sense of the word makes us human and defines …
As I’ve written about on this site before, one of the best short programs for anyone interested in culture and mental health is the Summer School in Social and Cultural Psychiatry held annually at McGill. The course at the center of the curriculum is “Cultural Psychiatry: A Critical Introduction” which consists primarily of lectures by Laurence Kirmayer, Allan Young…
When Robert Lemelson, an anthropologist, filmmaker, and research professor at UCLA, recently visited the George Washington University to speak at a conference on how ethnographic films can help us understand torture, I had to request an interview. I confess—I have long been a fan of Lemelson’s films, which I have seen screened at meetings as large as those …