Extraordinary conditions : culture and experience in mental illness

With a fine-tuned ethnographic sensibility, Janis H. Jenkins explores the lived experience of psychosis, trauma, and depression among people of diverse cultural orientations, revealing how mental illness engages fundamental human processes of self, desire, gender, identity, attachment, and interpretation. __Extraordinary Conditions__ illuminates the cultural shaping of extreme psychological suffering and the social rendering of the mentally ill as nonhuman or not fully human. Jenkins contends that mental illness is better characterized in terms of struggle than symptoms and that culture is central to all aspects of mental illness from onset to recovery. Her analysis refashions the boundaries between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the routine and the extreme, and the healthy and the pathological. This book asserts that the study of mental illness is indispensable to the anthropological understanding of culture and experience, and reciprocally that understanding culture and experience is critical to the study of mental illness. "With fine-tuned ethnographic sensibility, Jenkins explores the lived experience of psychosis, trauma, and depression among people of diverse cultural orientations, eloquently showing how mental illness engages fundamental human processes of self, desire, gender, identity, attachment, and meaning. Her studies illustrate the shaping of human reality and subjectivity in light of extreme psychological suffering, and shed light on psycho-political processes of alterity, precarity, and repression in the social rendering of the mentally ill as non-human or less than fully human. Extraordinary Conditions addresses the critical need to empathically engage the experience of persons living with conditions that are culturally defined as mental illness. Jenkins compellingly shows that mental illness is better characterized in terms of struggle than symptoms and that culture matters vitally in all aspects of mental illness from onset to recovery. Analysis at this edge of experience refashions the boundaries between ordinary and extraordinary, routine and extreme, healthy and pathological. The book argues that the study of mental illness is indispensable to anthropological understanding of culture and experience, and reciprocally that understanding culture and experience is critical to the study of mental illness. While anthropology neglects the extraordinary to its theoretical and empirical peril, psychiatry neglects culture to its theoretical and clinical peril" ... Provided by publisher With a fine-tuned ethnographic sensibility, Janis H. Jenkins explores the lived experience of psychosis, trauma, and depression among people of diverse cultural orientations, revealing how mental illness engages fundamental human processes of self, desire, gender, identity, attachment, and interpretation. Extraordinary Conditions illuminates the cultural shaping of extreme psychological suffering and the social rendering of the mentally ill as nonhuman or not fully human.

Jenkins contends that mental illness is better characterized in terms of struggle than symptoms and that culture is central to all aspects of mental illness from onset to recovery. Her analysis refashions the boundaries between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the routine and the extreme, and the healthy and the pathological. This book asserts that the study of mental illness is indispensable to the anthropological understanding of culture and experience, and reciprocally that understanding culture and experience is critical to the study of mental illness. Cover 1 Extraordinary Conditions 2 Title 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 6 Contents 8 List of Figures and Tables 10 Prelude and Acknowledgments 12 Introduction: Culture, Mental Illness, and the Extraordinary 20 PART ONE. PSYCHOSIS, PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY, AND FAMILIES 40 1. Cultural Chemistry in the Clozapine Clinic 42 2. This Is How God Wants It? The Struggle of Sebastián 90 3. Expressed Emotion and Conceptions of Mental Illness: Social Ecology of Families Living with Schizophrenia 115 PART TWO. VIOLENCE, TRAUMA, AND DEPRESSION 158 4. The Impress of Extremity among Salvadoran Refugees 160 5. Blood and Magic: No Hay que Creer ni Dejar de Creer 199 6. Trauma and Trouble in the Land of Enchantment 233 Conclusion: Fruits of the Extraordinary 268 Notes 284 Works Cited 300 Index 346 Content: Introduction : culture, mental illness, and the extraordinary -- Cultural chemistry in the Clozapine clinic -- This is how God wants it? : the struggle of Sebastián -- Emotion and conceptions of mental illness: the social ecology of families living with schizophrenia -- The impress of extremity among Salvadoran women refugees -- Blood and magic : no hay que creer ni dejar de creer -- Trauma and trouble in the land of enchantment -- Conclusion : fruits of the extraordinary.