Comments(0) Prof. Thomas Csordas will join us for a discussion of the methodology of clinical ethnography. The focus of the discussion will be a study entitled Southwest Youth and the Experience of Psychiatric Treatment which addresses the experience of Navajo, Pueblo, Hispanic, and Anglo adolescent inpatients in a state public hospital and an Indian Health Service hospital.
Thomas J. Csordas is Professor of Anthropology at the
Comments(0) Please join us at 7 pm, 4/10/2008 at Bert’s house for Dr. Kalman Applbaum’s presentation.
“‘Consumers are patients’: Shared decision making and treatment
non-compliance as business opportunity.”
This paper describes an aspect of the progressive insertion of commercial interests into the relationship between patients and their clinicians, with particular reference to psychiatry. Treatment non-compliance, long an obstacle intractable to amelioration by healthcare professionals, has lately drawn the attention of the pharmaceutical and allied industries as a site at which to improve return on investment (ROI). Newfound corporate “compliance departments” and specialized consultancies that regard non-compliance as a form of marketing failure are seeking to rectify it with reinvigorated models and strategies. This intervention stands to impact patients’ experience of illness as well as the participation of those formally (physicians, case managers, etc.) and informally (family, friends, etc.) involved in treatment. My analysis draws from compliance conferences to demonstrate the contrasting models of patient empowerment implied by the marketing
vs. medical approaches. I propose a research agenda for measuring the effects of industry compliance programs.
Kalman Applbaum received his PhD from Harvard University, specializing in medical anthropology. He has published on marketing and psychiatry in the US, Israel and Japan. His books include: /The Marketing Era: From Professional Practice to Global Provisioning/ (Routledge, 2003) /Consumption and Market Society in Israel /(with Yoram S. Carmeli, Berg, 2004). He is currently interested in the comparative role of
psychopharmaceuticals in the transformation of psychiatric practice and the deinstitutionalization of mental healthcare between Japan and the United States. Rather than conceiving of the two healthcare environmnets as two very different places, he looks at the commonalities in psychiatric institutionaltization. His focus is on globalization itself
not as an incidental context or consequence but as a direct subject - a possible irritant in the increase of mental illness around the world.
Please join us at 7 pm, 4/10/2008 at Bert’s house for Dr. Kalman Applbaum’s presentation.
Comments(0) We have a very exciting spring schedule, including the upcoming 2 presentations:
4/10/2008 Dr. Kalman Applbaum
4/24/2008 Prof. Thomas Csordas
We hope you will join us!
Comments(0) Rebecca Seligman, PhD., Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University
Toward a Cultural Psychiatry of Dissociative Experience: Integrating Narrative, Metaphor, and Mechanism
Approaches to trance and possession in anthropology have tended to treat dissociative phenomena as purely discursive processes of attributing action and experience to agencies other than the self. Within psychology and psychiatry, understanding of dissociative disorders has been hindered by polemical “either/or” arguments: either dissociative disorders are real, spontaneous, alterations in brain states that reflect basic neurobiological phenomena, or they are imaginary, socially constructed, role performances dictated by interpersonal expectations, power dynamics, and cultural scripts. In this paper, I outline an approach to dissociative phenomena, including trance, possession and spiritual and healing practices, that integrates notions of underlying mechanisms with sociocultural processes of the narrative construction and social presentation of the self. This integrative model can advance ethnographic studies and inform clinical approaches to dissociation through careful consideration of the impact of social context.
Rebecca Seligman is a medical and psychological anthropologist who focuses on transcultural psychiatry, or the study of mental health in cross-cultural perspective. She recently completed a Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) funded postdoctoral fellowship in the department of Psychiatry at McGill University. Her past research has explored the connection between mental health and religious participation in Northeastern Brazil. This research examined the ways in which a particular religious belief system shapes the meanings of individual psychosocial stress and psychological distress, and showed that intense religious participation functions therapeutically for vulnerable individuals. Rebecca Seligman’s other research projects include an examination of the relationships among symptoms of PTSD, dissociation, and psychosis in traumatized immigrant and refugee patients treated at a psychiatric clinic in Canada, and how culture factors into diagnosis and treatment in this context. She is currently developing a project investigating how cultural background and
acculturative processes affect the unusually high rates of PTSD found among Latino immigrants in the U.S.
Please join us for Prof. Seligman’s talk on Thurs, Feb 14th, 2008, at 7pm at Bert Cohler’s home, 5408 S. BlackstonePersons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Rachel Brezis, brezisrs@uchicago.edu or Nicole Martinez, girasol@uchicago.edu.
Comments(0) Please join us for our next Clinical Ethnography Workshop, this Thurs, Jan. 31st, at Prof. Bert Cohler’s home, 5408 S. Blackstone, at 7pm, featuring:
Kim Walters
Big Brains, Good Friends and Suicides: Examining the Production of Self in Indian Schools
India owes much of its recent economic rise–particularly as it is tied to the IT market–to an educational system producing high competencies in math and science. To date, schooling in India has been largely exam-oriented and based in rote learning. National publicity of the results of annual exams has created extreme competition among Indian children, and exam-related suicides are prevalent. Still, the fact that Indian students like school and the other students there contrasts with the tense social dramas of American secondary schools. With middle and upper-class Indian students spending the vast majority of their waking hours in class, in tuitions, or in studies, formal education rivals and perhaps trumps family life as the locus of formative emotional and interpersonal experience for non-poor youth. In my future fieldwork, I want to examine the development of the Self within the context of the Indian school system in the IT boomtown of Hyderabad. I am also interested in the contestation of prevailing pedagogy by a new crop of “liberal” and “child-centered” schools that vilify the nose-to-the-grindstone system that has enabled India to acquire much of its new-found wealth.
Kim Walters is a fourth year psychological anthropology student in Comparative Human Development. She graduated with honors from Brigham Young University where she wrote her BA thesis from fieldwork she did among the OvaHimba of Namibia on gender and spirit possession. She completed an MA in anthropology from the University of Alabama, where
she researched individual Christian conversion narratives as they compared with conversion meta-narratives provided by missionaries in Vizag, India. Her trial research in CHD was a study of the production of holiness through the Ayyappa /diksha /among middle-aged Hindu men in Bangalore, India.
Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Rachel Brezis, brezisrs@uchicago.edu or Nicole Martinez, girasol@uchicago.edu.
Comments(0) On January 17, 2008, Farr Curlin, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Section of General Internal Medicine and the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, University of Chicago, will present the following talk:
“Religion and Psychiatry: Worldviews apart?”
Religion and psychiatry have related to one another historically in strainedand at times hostile ways. In this talk, Dr. Curlin will review results from a national survey of physicians to: 1) compare the religious characteristics of psychiatrists to those of other physicians, 2) examine whether non-psychiatrist physicians who are religious are less willing than their colleagues to refer to psychiatrists and psychologists, and 3) compare the ways in which psychiatrists and nonpsychiatrists interpret the relationship between religion/spirituality and health and address religion/spirituality issues in the clinical encounter. Findings suggest that although psychiatrists continue to be much less religious than nonpsychiatrists, the vast majority of psychiatrists appreciate the importance of religion and/or spirituality on at least a functional level. Moreover, compared to other physicians, psychiatrists appear to be more comfortable and have more experience addressing religious and spiritual in the clinical setting. In light of these findings, Dr. Curlin will describe historic tensions between religion and psychiatry and suggest ways they may continue to shape the care patients receive for mental health conditions.
Please note that this talk will be at a different time and location than customary:
January 18, 2008
Judd 313
5:00 pm
Food and refreshments will be served.
Comments(0) For the Winter 2008 session, Clinical Ethnography is pleased to present the following speakers:
1/17/2008 Dr. Farr Curlin (MD), Medicine, University of Chicago,
”Religion and Psychiatry: Worldviews Apart?” [special time & location]
1/31/2008 Kim Walters, PhD student, Dept. of Comparative Human Development
2/14/2008 Dr. Rebecca Seligman, Anthropology, Northwestern University [special time & location]
2/28/2008 Hallie Kushner, PhD student, Dept. of Comparative Human Development
We look forward to seeing people at these events!
Comments(0) Our next Clinical Ethnography workshop will be held Thurs, November 15th, at Bert Cohler’s home at 7pm. Amy Sousa, a graduate student in the Dept. of Comparative Human Development, will be presenting materials from her dissertation proposal and is looking forward to our feedback:
“Psychiatric Transformations: Pharmaceuticals and emergent conceptions of normality in India today”
In areas of the world renowned for their traditional medical systems, such as India, the mentally ill and their family members are opting ever increasingly for modern cures, such as pharmaceutical drugs. The potential thus increases for traditional treatments to be supplanted and reconfigured within new practical and conceptual frameworks. This research attempts to better understand the social transformations engendered by interactions between Western psychiatry and non-Western societies in India. My project takes as its starting point the intersection of the pharmaceutical industry, doctors, and patients in psychiatric hospitals in North India. I hope to discern how modern psychiatric institutions become a critical junction from which new conceptions of health and wellbeing are produced and disseminated. In doing so, this research will query how society gets reconfigured when people become increasingly willing to use pharmaceutical solutions for age old problems such as anxiety and unhappiness. It will also investigate how such a reconfiguration might differ between classes and socioeconomic groups. In sum, I hope to highlight the possibilities for and possible limitations of pharmaceutical interventions for the treatment of psychopathology in India today.
Amy Sousa’s research interests include medical anthropology, psychiatry, and global trends in pharmaceutical use. She will soon be returning to India to complete 12 months of fieldwork that will investigate the social implications of biomedical psychiatry there. Amy graduated from New York University with a BA in Anthropology and completed an MA in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago before transferring to Human Development, where she is a 3rd year student.
Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please contact Rachel Brezis, brezisrs@uchicago.edu or Nicole Martinez, girasol@uchicago.edu.
Comments(0) On Nov. 1, 2008, 7 pm, at the home of Prof. Bert Cohler, Jocelyn Marrow (Graduate Student, Dept. of Comparative Human Development) will be discussing:
Longing in Love as a Modern, Middle-Class Virahini
This presentation explores the meaning of a folk illness, clenched
teeth, to sufferers and others who are important to them. I show how
clenched teeth illness and the sentiment of viraha (love sickness) are
appropriated by distressed persons in the modern milieu of northeastern
Uttar Pradesh. Part of my demonstration of clenched teeth illness as a
“modern” illness involves a comparison with spirit possession, with
which clenched teeth illness may be identical in terms of signs and
symptoms. Spirit possession has come to represent the backwardness,
illiteracy, and ignorance of the lower classes in India, whereas
clenched teeth illness embodies some aspects of expressive individualism
and responds well to modern biomedical treatment. While clenched teeth
illness and spirit possession function as embodied social structures, in
Bourdieu’s sense, meaning that the practice of one or the other
associates persons with a particular class status, my data do not
support a neat hierarchical association of habitus with cultural,
social, or economic capital. Instead, attitudes towards global modernity
and the prevalence of alternative imagined lives play a crucial role in
bodily practices, diagnostic and treatment decisions. That is, persons
construct their position vis-à-vis modernity with specific emotional and
bodily practices in order to accomplish goals in the immediate environment.
Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please
contact Rachel Brezis, brezisrs@uchicago.edu or Nicole Martinez,
girasol@uchicago.edu.
Amy Sousa (Graduate Student, Dept. of Comparative Human Development) will be presenting at the Clinical Ethnography Workshop on Nov. 15, 2007.
Comments(0) Julia Cassaniti, Graduate Student in the Dept. of Comparative Human Development will be presenting a talk Thursday, October. 18, 2007 at 7 pm.
Mental health and the cultural saliency of emotion: A case study from Thailand
Julia Cassaniti is a 6th year PhD student in the Department of Comparative Human Development. She has recently returned from field work in Thailand, where she studied the relevance of Buddhism and Christianity in the cultural psychology of everyday life.
Contact Nicole Martinez (girasol@uchicago.edu) or Rachel Brezis (brezisrs@uchicago.edu) for details
