Extraordinary conditions : culture and experience in mental illness /

Extraordinary conditions : culture and experience in mental illness /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Jenkins, Janis H., author.
Edition:	First edition.
Imprint:	Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2015] ©2015
Description:	xviii, 343 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Language:	English
Subject:	Mental illness -- Cross-cultural studies. Mental illness -- Social aspects. Medical anthropology. Ethnopsychology. Ethnopsychology. Medical anthropology. Mental illness. Mental illness -- Social aspects. Cross-cultural studies.
Format:	Print Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/10383477

Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:	9780520287099 (cloth : alk. paper) 0520287096 (cloth : alk. paper) 9780520287112 (pbk. : alk. paper) 0520287118 (pbk. : alk. paper) 9780520962224 (ebook) 0520962222 (ebook)
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references (pages 281-325) and index.
Summary:	"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.

Description
Summary:	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.<br> <br> <br> <br> 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.
Physical Description:	xviii, 343 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Bibliography:	Includes bibliographical references (pages 281-325) and index.
ISBN:	9780520287099 0520287096 9780520287112 0520287118 9780520962224 0520962222