Book

Extraordinary conditions : culture and experience in mental illness

Jenkins, Janis H., author

Overview

\"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.

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Subject: Mental illness Cross-cultural studies. / Mental illness Social aspects. / Medical anthropology. / Ethnopsychology.
• ISBN: 9780520287099, 0520287096, 9780520287112, 0520287118

Item info:

1 item available

1 item total in all locations

Holdings :

Call Number	Copies	Material	Location
RC455.4.E8 J46 2015	1	BOOK	AUTOSTORE