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 …
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’ …
Meaning, Madness and Political Subjectivity: A Study of Schizophrenia in Turkey
By Sadeq Rahimi
Routledge, 2015, 248 pages
This book is issued by “The International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis” series, which aims at enhancing the dialogues between social scientists and practitioners, especially in the fields of trauma, attachment relationships in the family, in social settings, and …
While training in psychiatry, I frequently heard mental-health practitioners refer to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) as our profession’s “diagnostic bible.” The DSM, of course, is the text produced by a cabal of psychiatric experts that defines the parameters of mental illness and, by extension, mental health. It textually conveys the now commonplace assumption that psychiatry works through systems …
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 …