A  B  C  D  E  F  G  H  I  J  K  L  M  N  O  P  Q  R  S  T  U  V  W  X  Y  Z  

  Subjects -> ANTHROPOLOGY (Total: 398 journals)
The end of the list has been reached or no journals were found for your choice.
   Most Followed Journals

   Top Publishers

   Top Subjects
Similar Journals
Journal Cover
Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry
Journal Prestige (SJR): 0.375
Citation Impact (citeScore): 1
Number of Followers: 16  
 
  Hybrid Journal Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles)
ISSN (Print) 0165-005X - ISSN (Online) 1573-076X
Published by Springer-Verlag Homepage  [2467 journals]
  • The Evolving Culture Concept in Psychiatric Cultural Formulation:
           Implications for Anthropological Theory and Psychiatric Practice

    • Free pre-print version: Loading...

      Abstract: Abstract 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. DSM-IV relied on a culture concept of coherent ethnic communities sharing coherent cultures, primarily for minoritized ethnoracial individuals in the United States. Changing demographics and newer immigration patterns around the world deminoritized the culture concept for DSM-5. After George Floyd’s death and demands for social justice, the culture concept in DSM-5-TR emphasized social structures. The article proposes an intersubjective model of culture through which patients and clinicians work through similarities and differences. It recommends a revised formulation that attends to clinician practices such as communicating, diagnosing, recommending treatments, and documenting, beyond collecting patient meanings. It also raises the question of whether an intersubjective model of culture prompts reconsiderations of culture-related text in other sections of the DSM. The social sciences can redirect attention to the clinician’s culture of biomedicine to close patient health disparities.
      PubDate: 2023-03-24
       
  • Is it Still Ok to be Ok' Mental Health Labels as a Campus Technology

    • Free pre-print version: Loading...

      Abstract: Abstract 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. Labels emerge as flexible, fluid and contextual. We thus follow Eli Clare in attending to the varying degrees of sincerity, authenticity and pragmatism in dealing with labels. Our findings give pause to two sets of enquiry that are sometimes seen as opposed. Quantitative mental health research relies on what appear to be questionable assumptions about labels embedded in questionnaires. But concerns about the dialogical power of labels to medicalise students also appears undermined.
      PubDate: 2023-03-24
       
  • Explanatory Models of (Mental) Health Among Sub-Saharan African Migrants
           in Belgium: A Qualitative Study of Healthcare Professionals’ Perceptions
           and Practices

    • Free pre-print version: Loading...

      Abstract: Abstract 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. The study goals were threefold: first, to assess professionals’ perceptions of the explanatory models of their patients of SSA descent; second, to examine how these perceptions influence treatment practices; and third, to investigate the role of the professionals’ cultural backgrounds, comparing the results between professionals with and without an SSA background. Twenty-two in-depth interviews with mental health professionals were thematically analyzed, with ten of the participants of SSA descent. Results show that all professionals perceived differences between Western and SSA explanatory models of (mental) health. Causal beliefs were mentioned as the most important difference, including their influence on coping strategies and health-seeking behavior among patients of SSA descent. Professionals’ perceptions and familiarity with SSA explanatory models of (mental) health affected their treatment practices. Language and conceptual interpretation difficulties were encountered less frequently by professionals of SSA descent. Those with a Western background applied “culturally sensitive” practices, while professionals of SSA descent implemented an integrated approach. These results contribute to ongoing discussions about what is considered “cultural competency.”
      PubDate: 2023-03-20
       
  • The Work of Illness in the Aftermath of a ‘Surpassing Disaster’:
           Medical Humanities in the Middle East and North Africa

    • Free pre-print version: Loading...

      PubDate: 2023-03-13
       
  • Medicine and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa:
           Transdisciplinary Approaches in Medical Humanities

    • Free pre-print version: Loading...

      PubDate: 2023-03-10
       
  • The Colonial Clinic in Conflict: Towards a Medical History of the
           Palestinian Great Revolt, 1936–1939

    • Free pre-print version: Loading...

      Abstract: Abstract This article reconstructs how Arab doctors, medical missionaries, British counterinsurgents, and Palestinian rebels negotiated and contested the legitimate role of medical workers and healthcare in times of colonial conflict. Drawing insight from a medical anthropological literature which challenges the notion of medical neutrality as normative, and setting mandate Palestine alongside other case studies of medicine in times of conflict from the interwar Middle East and North Africa, this article argues that while healthcare and medical authority could be put to work to support the colonial status quo, they could serve other, more radical ends too. To highlight the complexity of the political positioning of medical workers and healthcare, this article focuses on the town of Hebron during the great revolt which rocked the foundations of British rule in Palestine between 1936 and 1939, and relies on a range of colonial and missionary archival sources. The first part of the article uses the case study of an Egyptian medical doctor who took up political office in the town in moments of crisis to show how medical authority could be consciously transmuted into a force to uphold a besieged political order. The second part draws on the diary of a British mission doctor to reconstruct his efforts to assert medical neutrality during the great revolt, and—more strikingly still—how Palestinian insurgents participated actively in this attempt to transplant international legal protections to Hebron. The final part traces the incorporation of healthcare into the strategies of both British counterinsurgents and Palestinian rebels, with the British policy of collective punishment indirectly but appreciably degrading access to healthcare for Palestinians, and Palestinian counterstate ambitions extending to the establishment of insurgent medical services in the hills.
      PubDate: 2023-03-01
       
  • Nationalism, Authoritarianism, and Medical Mobilization in
           Post-revolutionary Egypt

    • Free pre-print version: Loading...

      Abstract: Abstract In this article, we investigate the links between medical practice and expertise, on the one hand, and nationalist discourses, on the other, in the 2011 Egyptian uprising and the years that followed, which witnessed a consolidation of authoritarianism. We ask how it is that doctors, whose social capital in part rests on their being seen as “apolitical,” played a significant role in countering consecutive regimes’ acts of violence and denial. We trace the trajectory of the doctors’ mobilization in the 2011 uprising and beyond and demonstrate how the doctors drew on their professional expertise and nationalist sentiment in their struggles against a hypernationalistic military state. Borrowing the ideas of immanence and transcendence from religious studies and philosophy, we argue that the doctors put forth an immanent vision of the nation as a force that is manifested in the lives of its citizens, in contrast with the State’s transcendent vision of nationalism, in which the nation resides outside of and beyond citizens’ lives. Relying on interviews and media analysis, we show how medicine has served as a site of awakening, conversion narratives, and building of bridges in a polarized society where the doctors were able to rely on their “neutral” expertise to present themselves as reliable witnesses, narrators, and actors.
      PubDate: 2023-03-01
       
  • The Broken Promise of Institutional Psychiatry: Sexuality, Women and
           Mental Illness in 1950s Lebanon

    • Free pre-print version: Loading...

      Abstract: Abstract This article traces the case of Hala, a woman chronic patient of the Lebanon Hospital for Mental and Nervous Disorders (LHMND) in late 1950s Lebanon. Her story reveals a conglomeration of actors, expertise and technologies that regulated both her sexuality and mental illness, as she was moved, returned, then moved again, from the care of the family to the care of the psychiatric institution. By reconstructing an ethnographic case of the story of Hala, the article tackles an under-investigated area of research at the intersection of subjectivity, sexuality, psychiatry and family life. The case of Hala illustrates an on-going tension in defining and diagnosing mental illness for women between two forms of care: institutional psychiatry on one hand—promising a quick return of patients to society—and the family on the other, with its own understandings of what constitutes abnormality for women. Having lived at the hospital for more than twenty years, Hala’s voice and experience provide a powerful contribution to the ethnographic history of psychiatry in Lebanon. The article tackles questions on competing psychiatric and social authorities and the formation of psychiatric subjectivities. It also provides methodological and ethical reflections on the use of archives when conducting ethnographic research on psychiatry from the global peripheries. The case of Hala illustrates the patient’s own experience of LHMND’s policies of social rehabilitation in the late 1950s. It adds to a broader understanding of the processes that have led to the pathologizing of sexuality in under-studied societies such as Lebanon and the Middle East.
      PubDate: 2023-03-01
       
  • Evenings with Molly: Adult Couples’ Use of MDMA for Relationship
           Enhancement

    • Free pre-print version: Loading...

      Abstract: Abstract Within the modern resurgence of psychedelics as medicinal agents for a range of conditions, the story of MDMA (Ecstasy, Molly) has been re-narrated from a dangerous street drug to a breakthrough mental health therapy. Even still, the story of MDMA remains incomplete within a binary discourse of deviant recreational use versus psychotherapeutic-medical use. The present research aimed to uncover an emerging model of MDMA use grounded in the experiences of adult couples using MDMA privately and in the context of their committed relationships. Eight adult couples who self-reported active MDMA use were recruited for confidential in-depth interviews exploring questions related to drug, set, and setting as a general framework for understanding their private experiences with MDMA. A general inductive coding process was used to arrive at four overarching themes: Conscious Use, A Tool for Exploring, Planned Recovery, and Difficult Experiences. Couples reported making purposeful decisions about MDMA use, collaborating together on becoming physically and emotionally “set” for their drug experience. Couples described positive effects on communication, intimate bonding, and providing a relationship “tune up,” among other durable changes to the relationship. An emerging cognitive-relational model of “evenings with Molly” contrasts with existing models of use by suggesting the possibility of informed, non-problematic adult use of the drug for cognitive and relational enhancement. With a small, homogenous sample reporting generally positive experiences with MDMA self-administration, findings from this study cannot be generalized. It remains unknown what proportion of the total MDMA user population might align with the non-problematic adult use of MDMA explored in this study. Additional focused investigations might examine the prevalence and varieties of non-clinical use among adults in order to arrive at rational, science-based regulatory frameworks.
      PubDate: 2023-03-01
       
  • What About Us' Experiences of Relatives Regarding Physician-Assisted
           Death for Patients Suffering from Mental Illness: A Qualitative Study

    • Free pre-print version: Loading...

      Abstract: Abstract Physician-assisted death (PAD) for patients suffering from mental illness is legally permitted in the Netherlands. Although patients’ relatives are not entrusted with a legal role, former research revealed that physicians take into account the patient’s social context and their well-being, in deciding whether or not to grant the request. However, these studies focussed on relatives’ experiences in the context of PAD concerning patients with somatic illness. To date, nothing is known on their experiences in the context of PAD concerning the mentally ill. We studied the experiences of relatives with regard to a PAD request by patients suffering from mental illness. The data for this study were collected through 12 interviews with relatives of patients who have or had a PAD request because of a mental illness. We show that relatives are ambivalent regarding the patient’s request for PAD and the following trajectory. Their ambivalence is characterised by their understanding of the wish to die and at the same time hoping that the patient would make another choice. Respondents’ experiences regarding the process of the PAD request varied, from positive (‘intimate’) to negative (‘extremely hard’). Some indicated that they wished to be more involved as they believe the road towards PAD should be a joint trajectory. To leave them out during such an important event is not only painful, but also harmful to the relative as it could potentially complicate their grieving process. Professional support during or after the PAD process was wanted by some, but not by all.
      PubDate: 2023-03-01
       
  • “We All Go a Little Mad Sometimes:” Representations of Insanity in the
           Films of Alfred Hitchcock

    • Free pre-print version: Loading...

      Abstract: Abstract Themes connected with mental illness and psychiatry frequently feature in the works of Alfred Hitchcock. Some critics believe it is a reflection of the director’s own mental health issues. Yet, it is more likely that Hitchcock was inspired by the Gothic tradition and the legacy of Edgar Allan Poe as well as the popularity of psychoanalysis in post war U.S. culture. This article looks at Hitchcock’s feature-length films in order to analyse the representation of psychopathic characters as perpetrators of crime and the disturbed mother–child relationships which may lead to mental aberrations. Furthermore, it presents the ways in which Hitchcock subtly undermines popular conceptions about the relationship between mental illness and crime, and the role of psychiatry in explaining unusual behaviour.
      PubDate: 2023-03-01
       
  • Visceral Visions: Rethinking Embodiment and Desire in Global Mental Health

    • Free pre-print version: Loading...

      Abstract: Abstract The globalization of biomedicine poses the problem of finding cross-culturally valid criteria for mental health. Undue pathologization is a major risk for global health, especially when diagnoses rely exclusively on Western nosology. This article focuses on the clinical conflation between involuntary mass possession and conversion disorder. Originally, the diagnosis of “conversion disorder” evolved from the notion of hysteria. Even though the category of hysteria disappeared from psychiatry many decades ago, some of its undergirding assumptions have survived under the new label of conversion. Namely, the assumption that hysteria/conversion is caused by repressed sexual desire is still implicit in widespread explanatory models for mass possession worldwide. Drawing upon an ethnography of demonic possession (grisi siknis) among the Afro-Indigenous Miskitos of Nicaragua, I argue that (1) the label of conversion is eurocentric and inappropriate for mass possession; and (2) emic perspectives on mass possession offer a critical counterpoint to rethink Euro-American and globalized understandings of embodiment and desire.
      PubDate: 2023-03-01
       
  • Psychiatry, Disaster, Security: Mediterranean Assemblages

    • Free pre-print version: Loading...

      Abstract: Abstract This article traces the development of a transnational psychiatric collaboration between psychiatrists and psychologists in Turkey and Israel in the wake of a massive earthquake that struck Turkey in 1999. Based on extended ethnographic fieldwork in sites across the earthquake region, the project on which this article is based is concerned with how the Turkish mental health professionals who responded to the earthquake struggled to improvise a therapeutic response that could address the scale of psychological suffering precipitated by the earthquake. This article considers the development of a specific intervention in order to examine, first, the striking adaptability and mobility of these forms of psychiatric expertise and, second, their distinct capacity to draw together two divergent contexts—one characterized by the effects of a destructive seismic event, the other by a lasting politics of colonial occupation—into a common technical, psychiatrically constituted space. Tracing these transnational entanglements will offer a means for understanding the conditions of possibility for the circulation of medical expertise in the region and, with it, emerging transregional arrangements of psychiatry, disaster, and security.
      PubDate: 2023-03-01
       
  • Artifacts of Care: The Collection of Medical Records by Families in North
           India

    • Free pre-print version: Loading...

      Abstract: Abstract In India, where there is no centralized medical records system, biomedical care providers rely on families to explain their child’s illness and to carry records of any previous treatment the child may have received. Drawing on discussions of documentation, I argue that in the context of medical treatment for pediatric seizures, (1) families collect medical records to enable and shape their child’s medical treatment, and (2) such a merging of medical and familial care is necessitated by the nature of their child’s illness and the structure of the Indian healthcare system. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Meerut and New Delhi, this paper attends to practices of record keeping to understand the demands biomedical institutions place on families for the treatment of their child’s seizures. I examine the creation, maintenance, and movement of medical records to suggest that documents are a point of intersection between medical and kinship practices. They are artifacts of care that can narrate parallel histories of a patient’s illness and family-clinician efforts to alleviate a child’s suffering.
      PubDate: 2023-03-01
       
  • The Ethical Work of Weight Loss Surgery: Creating Reflexive, Effortless,
           and Assertive Moral Subjects

    • Free pre-print version: Loading...

      Abstract: Abstract While higher-weight bodies have been radically medicalized in modern Western discourse, they are also culturally conceived as a moral project. In clinical settings aimed at transforming the body, the consultation sessions between bariatric professionals and patients reveal nuanced moral deliberations. I suggest that bariatric surgery becomes a site of a “moral breakdown,” where professionals direct patients to morally recuperate not only through technologies of the self, such as intensive bodywork and diets, but through “moral laboratories,” which invite moments of experimentation in everyday life. Drawing on ethnographic inquiry in a bariatric clinic, I argue that this moral project is understood through new relationships within various registers of patients’ subjectivity. First, patients are instructed to “listen to their bodies” and to reconnect to their embodied sensations. They are further guided to cognitively imitate an effortless “thin state of mind.” And finally, they are instructed to “put themselves first” by reorganize their interactions with significant others. Professional guidance encourages dialog and reflexivity within the patient that are consonant with neoliberal understandings of the self-disciplined subject, yet they expand, and at times undermine these neoliberal notions by attending to other body ethics and contesting elements of fat stigma.
      PubDate: 2023-03-01
       
  • Under Pressure: Living with Diabetes in Cairo

    • Free pre-print version: Loading...

      Abstract: Abstract This article is based on 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Cairo, Egypt during the years of 2015 and 2017 as part of a research project on the topic of type-2 diabetes. The article examines different understandings of the onset and treatment of type-2 diabetes across people in Cairo living with the condition and their healthcare providers. The article argues that those who are diagnosed with type-2 diabetes primarily relate their condition to experiences of ḍaghṭ (stress or pressure), above any other risk factors. This understanding clashes with healthcare providers who instead link type-2 diabetes primarily to obesity. The article exemplifies these different understandings of type-2 diabetes by drawing on the topic of food specifically, showing how the intake of food is not perceived by those diagnosed with type-2 diabetes as related to their condition in similar ways as is the case among their healthcare providers. As opposed to relating type-2 diabetes to matters of abundance and an excess consumption of food and calories, those in Cairo who are diagnosed with type-2 diabetes instead relate their condition to matters of deprivation and scarcity—as well as the experiences of ḍaghṭ brought on by such potential deprivation and scarcity.
      PubDate: 2023-03-01
       
  • Mixed-Method Investigations Uncovering Tension, PTSD Symptoms, and
           Trauma-Related Difficulties Among Indian Women from Slums Reporting
           Gender-Based Violence

    • Free pre-print version: Loading...

      Abstract: Abstract Indian women exposed to gender-based violence (GBV) report experiencing cultural concepts of distress, such as tension, and trauma-related difficulties. However, tension and trauma-related sequalae have not been explicitly explored. The present study examined the symptoms, causes, and coping strategies associated with tension among slum-residing Indian women reporting GBV (N = 100). This study also explored linkages between tension and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptom severity. Qualitative results among a subsample of women (n = 38) indicated tension was commonly reported. Tension was characterized by varied affective, behavioral, cognitive, and somatic components and was most commonly caused by interpersonal stressors. Participants described various coping strategies to manage tension, including avoiding, cognitively reframing, considering consequences, distracting themselves, seeking medical, religious and/or spiritual assistance, finding social support, and tolerating tension. Barriers to coping were stigma, hopelessness about present circumstances, and negative reactions from others. One-way analysis of covariance with Bonferroni-adjusted post hoc results (N = 100) indicated that participants with higher tension exhibited significantly higher PTSD symptom severity as compared to participants reporting no tension. Altogether, the polyvalence of tension suggested that it requires idiographic assessment. Tension appears responsive to skills consistent with evidence-based psychological treatments for Indian women from slums reporting GBV.
      PubDate: 2023-03-01
       
  • Staying Together No Matter What: Becoming Young Parents on the Streets of
           Vancouver

    • Free pre-print version: Loading...

      Abstract: Abstract Among young people who use drugs in the context of entrenched poverty and homelessness, pregnancy is often viewed as an event that can meaningfully change the trajectory of their lives. However, youth’s desires and decision-making do not always align with the perspectives of various professionals and systems regarding how best to intervene during pregnancies and early parenting. Drawing on longitudinal interviews and fieldwork with young people in Vancouver, Canada, we explore how their romantic relationships powerfully shaped understandings of what was right and wrong and which actions to take during pregnancy and early parenting, and how these moral worlds frequently clashed with the imperatives of healthcare, criminal justice, and child protection systems. We demonstrate how a disjuncture between youth’s desires, decision-making and moralities, and the systems that are intended to help them, can further entrench young people in cycles of loss, defeat, and harm. These cycles are powerfully racialized for young Indigenous people in our context.
      PubDate: 2023-01-24
       
  • Hallucinations and Hallucinogens: Psychopathology or Wisdom'

    • Free pre-print version: Loading...

      Abstract: Abstract Hallucinations are currently associated almost exclusively with psychopathological states. While it is evident that hallucinations can indicate psychopathology or neurological disorders, we should remember that hallucinations also commonly occur in people without any signs of psychopathology. A similar case occurs in the case of hallucinogenic drugs, which have been long associated with psychopathology and insanity. However, during the last decades a huge body of research has shown that certain kinds of hallucinations, exerted by hallucinogenic drugs, may serve to improve mental health. We propose that, in light of historical, epidemiological, and scientific research, hallucinations can be better characterized as a common phenomenon associated sometimes with psychopathology but also with functional and even beneficial outcomes. In the last sections of the manuscript, we extend our argument, suggesting that hallucinations can offer a via regia to knowledge of the mind and the world. This radical shift in the cultural interpretation of hallucinations could have several implications for fields such as drug policy, civil law, and psychiatry, as well as for the stigma associated with mental disorders.
      PubDate: 2023-01-12
      DOI: 10.1007/s11013-022-09814-0
       
  • Correction to: “Women as Troublemakers”: The Hard Sociopolitical
           Context of Soft Bipolar Disorder in Iran

    • Free pre-print version: Loading...

      PubDate: 2022-12-01
      DOI: 10.1007/s11013-021-09752-3
       
 
JournalTOCs
School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences
Heriot-Watt University
Edinburgh, EH14 4AS, UK
Email: journaltocs@hw.ac.uk
Tel: +00 44 (0)131 4513762
 


Your IP address: 3.226.122.122
 
Home (Search)
API
About JournalTOCs
News (blog, publications)
JournalTOCs on Twitter   JournalTOCs on Facebook

JournalTOCs © 2009-