Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry

This article considers the ways in which empathy for patients and related solidarity with communities may be trained out of medical students during medical school. The article focuses especially on the pre-clinical years of medical school, those that begin with orientation and initiation events such as the White Coat Ceremony. The ethnographic data for the article come from field notes and recordings from my own medical training as well as hundreds of hours of observant participation and interviews with medical students over the past several years...

While researchers have highlighted the emotional distress of migrant domestic workers who experience abuse by employers, less is known about long-term effects of the psychological abuse that they experience. Drawing from a broader ethnographic study of Filipino and Indonesian migration to Chile, we analyze three Filipina domestic workers' migration narratives to examine how they narrate and manage the long-term effects of psychological abuse in the domestic workplace that they experienced more than ten years earlier...

Medical anthropologists have not paid enough attention to the variation at the level of the individual practitioners of biomedicine, and anthropological critiques of biomedical psychiatry as it is practiced in settings outside the Global North have tended to depict psychiatrists in monolithic terms. In this article, we attempt to demonstrate that, at least in the case of India, some psychiatrists perceive limitations in the biomedical model and the cultural assumptions behind biomedical practices and ideologies...

I argue that the emergence of ICBT (Internet Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), a novel computerized psychotherapeutic intervention, heralds a shift in the status of psychotherapy from craft to labor. Psychotherapy, as is practiced commonly today, retains its status as craft; therapists in managed settings still work within what I term an opaque bubble, their work invisible and uninterrupted, even by their immediate supervisors and managers. The therapists participating in the Israeli Ministry of Health's course training the first cohort of 'online therapists' find themselves in uncharted territory: The automation of psychotherapy in the form of ICBT constitutes the profession's first major 'division of labor,' not only minimizing the role of the human therapists, but rendering their craft transparent and controllable in ways previously unimaginable...

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a rapidly globalizing medical category, and there is a need to attend to the on the-ground processes through which laypeople deploy the ADHD label in different local contexts. Based on in-depth interviews with Israeli mothers of children with ADHD, this article explores how mothers, as lay actors in the social field of diagnosis, interpreted the origins and meanings of their child's 'troubles'. The temporal perspective on mothers' meaning-making processes revealed a progression of four common phases through which mothers revisited their understanding of ADHD, and recast their own responsibilities and moral roles...

On the basis of a research study on cognitive behavioral psychotherapies conducted between 2016 and 2020, this article analyzes exposure as a psychological technique focused on facing and overcoming distressing situations that interfere with everyday life and cause pain. Said psychotherapies have gained more relevance in Argentina in recent years. Their development and institutionalization continued during the first decades of the new millennium. By the late 1990s, there were social and economic transformations that modified people's lives and produced different types of suffering...

The field of medical action extends beyond the clinical encounter. Rather, clinical encounters are organized by wider regimes of governance and expertise, and broader geographies of care, abandonment and violence. Clinical encounters in penal institutions condense and render visible the fundamental situatedness of all clinical care. This article considers the complexity of clinical action in carceral institutions and their wider geographies through an examination of the crisis of mental health care in jails, an issue of significant public concern in the United States and much of the world...

Much has been written about the multifaceted significance of food and eating from an anthropological perspective; the same can be said about the role of food in collective identity construction and nation building. In contrast, the nexus of food, memory, psychological trauma, and disordered eating has been less explored. The aim of this interdisciplinary article is to synthesize available knowledge on this topic by engaging with research literature in fields such as food history, anthropology, sociology, and psychiatry as well as autobiographical works, cookbooks, etc...

This research investigates the impact of Coronavirus-2019 on individuals without housing and experiencing psychosis using semi-structured qualitative interviews and a case study format. We found that for our participants, life in the pandemic was generally more difficult and filled with violence. Further, the pandemic seemed to impact the content of psychosis directly, such that in some cases voices referred to politics around the virus. Being unhoused during the pandemic may increase the sense of powerlessness, social defeat, and the sense of failure in social interactions...

According to psychiatry, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a chronic condition beginning in early life. Psychiatry advocates for early diagnosis to prevent comorbidities that may emerge in untreated cases. "Late"-diagnosis is associated with various hazards that might harm patients' lives and society. Drawing on fieldwork in Israel, we found that 'midlife-ADHDers,' as our informants refer to themselves, express diverse experiences including some advantages of being diagnosed as adults rather than as children...

This clinical case study presents the case of a Latina Veteran experiencing psychosis and draws on eclectic theoretical sources, including user/survivor scholarship, phenomenology, meaning-oriented cultural psychiatry & critical medical anthropology, and Frantz Fanon's insight on 'sociogeny,' to emphasize the importance of attending to the meaning within psychosis and to ground that meaning in a person's subjective-lived experience and social world. The process of exploring the meaning and critical significance of the narratives of people experiencing psychosis is important for developing empathy and connection, the fundamental prerequisite for developing trust and therapeutic rapport...

Exploring how time emerges as a central problem for lone family caregivers of people with dementia, this article draws attention to care as a way of being in time with others. In addition to active doings that are oriented toward achieving goods that have drawn much attention in recent anthropological discussion on care, care of an intimate other often entails the state of being for the caregiver on which another person's way of being in the present heavily relies. Examining how time is experienced among caregivers who strive to live in the dyadic world of home-based dementia care in South Korea, I consider care as (non-)waiting both in the long term, anticipating the end of the state of caregiving, and in everyday life anticipating small and large fluctuations and interruptions...

Articulations of the chasm between ideal and attainable forms of care surfacing throughout the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic have highlighted the proliferation of unceremonious deaths associated with inequitable conditions. This paper reconsiders the preposterous temporality of pandemic care by following corpses in and out of clinical space. Written from the perspective of a MD/PhD student's encounter with a corpse replacing the patient on the medicine ward prior to pandemic onset, this paper asks how corpses might interrupt narratives of clinical care...

A key tenet of critical health research is that individual symptoms must be considered in light of the social and political contexts that shape or, in some cases, produce them. Precisely how oppressive social forces give rise to individual symptoms, however, remains challenging to theorize. This article contributes to debates over the interpretation of symptoms through a close reading of the case of Leon, an African American man struggling with an addiction to crack cocaine. Leon presented a complex illness narrative in which his addiction was clearly a product of structural racism, but also the result of dynamics within his family...

In Mexico, community-based, non-biomedical treatment models for substance use are legally recognized in national drug policy, monitored by state-level Departments of Health, and in some cases publicly funded. Academic research on centers that utilize these forms of treatment have focused primarily on documenting their rapid spread and describing their institutional practices, particularly human rights abuses and lack of established biomedical efficacy. In Tijuana, these community-based therapeutic models are shaped by conceptions of health and illness from the local cultural context of the United States-Mexico border zone in ways that do not cleanly match western, biomedical notions of the illness "addiction...

This article uses ethnography and coproduced ethnography to investigate mental health labels amongst university students in the UK. We find that although labels can still be a source of stigma, they are also both necessary and useful. Students use labels as 'campus technologies' to achieve various ends. This includes interaction with academics and administrators, but labels can do more than make student distress bureaucratically legible. Mental health labels extend across the whole student social world, as a pliable means of negotiating social interaction, as a tool of self-discovery, and through the 'soft-boy' online archetype, they can be a means of promoting sexual capital and of finessing romantic encounters...

For thirty years, psychiatrists and anthropologists have collaborated to improve the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. This collaboration has produced the DSM-IV Outline for Cultural Formulation (OCF) and the DSM-5 Cultural Formulation Interview (CFI). Nonetheless, some anthropologists have critiqued the concept of culture in DSM-5 as too focused on patient meanings and not on clinician practices. This article traces the evolution of the culture concept from DSM-IV through DSM-5-TR by analyzing publications from the American Psychiatric Association on the OCF and CFI alongside scholarship in psychiatry and anthropology...

Culturally differing approaches to the distinction between physical and mental health contribute to cultural differences in explanatory models of what we call "mental" health in a Western context. For this reason, we use "(mental) health" in this study when referring to these models or differences in understanding. This interpretative, interview-based qualitative study focuses on Belgian mental health professionals' perceptions of the (mental) health explanatory models held by their patients of sub-Saharan African (SSA) descent...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.