The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Anaïs Ogrizek is a psychiatrist, M.D, Ph.D and Fellow in Child an Adolescent Psychiatry at the Cohin Hospital in Paris, France. She received her MD at Paris V University and did her residency in Psychiatry at the University Hospitals of French West Indies, and holds a Master’s degree in Transcultural Psychology from Paris XIII University. She focuses her research on often overlooked communities of vulnerable populations in order to raise the scientific community’s concern on their condition and suggest ways to improve them.

What is your article “The Cultural Hybridization of Mothering in French Prison Nurseries: A Qualitative Study about?

My article is about how women incarcerated during pregnancy or along with their babies in French prison nurseries are being deprived from their original cultural environment. They go through a process close to creolization regarding their maternal cultural habits, with in the end the emergence of a specific hybrid culture around motherhood, even though they gather multiple factors of vulnerability for full prisonization, as a form of forced assimilation to prison culture. The results originate from a qualitative study led in 13 different prison nurseries in France: 25 mothers and 5 pregnant women were interviewed and interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to explore the data.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

Passionate about traveling, I became interested in transcultural psychiatry early on in my career. After a successful education some of which was spent in London and New York, I decided to pursue my medical studies at Paris V Descartes University in France. During my six years of study there I completed internships in both India and Canada, as well as a one-year Erasmus exchange in Hungary. After completing my general medical curriculum, I decided to specialize in psychiatry and travelled to French overseas territories to complete my residency. In French Guyana I took part in child psychiatric missions in Amerindian villages and worked in general psychiatry in Martinique.

Following my return to Paris, I achieved a master’s degree in transcultural psychology before completing a PhD research in psychology on the theme of the “motherhood in prison”, with a specific focus on cultural traditions around motherhood. Since then, I have been taking on a fellowship training program in Child and Adolescent psychiatry at the Maison de Solenn, Cochin Hospital in Paris, known worldwide as a place of expertise in transcultural psychiatry.

I am currently working on mothers that have left prison with their children after spending some time with them in prison nurseries, in order to explore how they readjust to their lives as free mothers on every level (on personal and domestic ones as well as social and cultural ones of course). On cultural aspects, our main hypothesis based on our prior results is that the cultural gap created by prison between these women and their outside community regarding traditions around motherhood could lead, at their release, to issues similar to those faced by migrant mothers: they might become migrant mothers from an inner to an outside prison world.

Based on my prior results of motherhood in prison nurseries, I am also working on a new and more general concept of “the baby function” – as a parallel to the term of “maternal function” commonly used – in the sense of what the baby can offer to his mother, or at contrariwise what he fails to offer. I intend to develop this innovative concept in a future article.

What drew you to this project?

I have always found the carceral environment very intriguing, with often multiple entanglements with psychiatric problematics, regarding the endorsement of responsibility for one’s personal action but also regarding institutional organization that have been put forward by the emblematic Goffman in his book “Asylums”. When I randomly discovered that babies were born and raised by their mothers in such an institution I immediately wanted to know more about these mothers’ experience as it aroused so many questions regarding so many different fields of research: personal, domestic, social, cultural, judicial, and ethical.

What was one of the most interesting findings?

The most interesting finding was to observe that no matter where in France these mothers were incarcerated (Metropolitan France or French oversea territory), they all seemed to show a similar cultural hybridization to some kind of ‘‘motherhood prison culture’’ regarding motherhood habits.

I am currently reading the thrilling work by Orna Donarth “Regretting Motherhood: a study” I recently watched and loved “Woman” a film by Anastasia Mikova, and Yann Arthus-Bertrand. I also very much enjoyed Yann Arthus-Bertand’s previous film “Human”.

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now?

I am currently re-reading ‘Snow Falling on Cedars’ by David Guterson which takes place on the islands neighbouring Vancouver and UBC. It is an excellent book but a harrowing story about the Japanese internment camps during World War II. This is also an often overlooked part of Canadian history.

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

I would say that this work shows once again how culture is a fundamental need for every human being, and how no matter how hard an ethnic group is oppressed, he will put all its strength in making some of its culture survive in some way or another.

Thank you for your time!

Other places to connect:
LinkedIn

The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Katyayni is a PhD Candidate at Brown University and has been researching and writing about health and healthcare since 2009. They are currently studying how families and healthcare professionals in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP) take care of children who experience seizures.

What is your article “Artifacts of Care: The Collection of Medical Records by Families in North India” about?

When a child in India suffers from a chronic illness, families are responsible for collecting and keeping the prescriptions and reports that doctor’s might use to understand the child’s medical and treatment history. In my article, I try to understand this form of documentation and recordkeeping.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.   

I developed an interest in studying illness after I spent a few days as a patient in a government hospital in New Delhi. In my senior year at Colby College, a course on Historical Epidemiology taught by Dr. James L.A. Webb Jr. guided me towards the study of public health. After post-graduate studies on the subject at the Harvard School of Public Health, I worked as a researcher with the World Bank Group in India, learning about the planning and implementation of public health programs in the country. I decided to pursue a PhD in Anthropology because I was drawn to ethnography as a research method and was inspired by the writings of Lawrence Cohen and Sarah Pinto on UP.

What drew you to this project?

I wanted to study the provision of medical care in western UP. I am from Meerut, a city in the region and through my research wanted to understand an aspect of life in the region. My supervisor, Dr. Bhrigupati Singh, encouraged me to focus my research on a particular disease condition or type of practitioner. I chose seizures among children because a colleague had once shared with me their experience of meeting a child in eastern UP who suffered from seizures and had been given a poor prognosis by their doctor. Hearing my colleague’s thoughts on the child’s condition and their family’s ability to care for them made me want to understand how seizures among children are understood and treated in UP.

What was one of the most interesting findings?

This research is ongoing and so my findings are currently half-baked. Nevertheless, one aspect of caring for children with seizures that I have found noteworthy is the role of repetition in both familial and medical care practices. I am pursuing this line of inquiry to consider how the repetitiveness of multiple actions (for instance giving a child their daily medications, taking them for monthly medical consultations) coalesces into what we might call caregiving.

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now?

I recently found the book, Here, by the illustrator Richard McGuire on my sister, deepani’s, bookshelf. And a good friend, the geographer Matthew Birkinshaw, gifted me the book, Deceptive Majority: Dalits, Hindus and Underground Religion, by the anthropologist Dr. Joel Lee. Both these books illustrate how intricate and multilayered histories can be told in ways that do not overwhelm their readers. I have enjoyed them very much.

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

Through my work on medical documents I hope to have reiterated the value of studying materials that accompany the practices we want to understand.

Thank you for your time!

The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Sarah Mars is an Associate Professional Researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. She is an anthropologist and historian who has been researching substance use and policy for several decades. Her current research focus is the US opioid/overdose epidemic and she is the author of The Politics of Addiction: Medical Conflict and Drug Dependence in England since the 1960s (Palgrave).

What is your article ‘The High Five Club’: Social relations and perspectives on HIV-related stigma during an HIV outbreak in West Virginia‘ about?

During our qualitative research in a West Virginia town where an outbreak of HIV was happening, we found strong agreement among people injecting drugs that HIV-related stigma had greatly diminished among their peers since the outbreak. Using Cultural Theory we considered the social and material mechanisms that might underlie this change. West Virginia’s drug overdose death rates are the highest in the US amidst widespread uptake of injecting. Although spending time together, people living homeless and injecting drugs were divided and constrained by extreme poverty and the demands of drug dependence, fostering a fatalistic approach to life events and decision-making. This fatalism undermined individuals’ aspirations to forming a mutually supportive group, the “High Five Club” of the title. (The name is an ingenious pun for ‘HIV’ where the V=5 in Roman numerals.) Yet this fatalism also contributed to mutual tolerance and acceptance of those diagnosed with HIV.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

Substance use and the social and political responses to it have long interested me. I moved to San Francisco from London almost two decades ago and, as a migrant, find that a comparative perspective always helps to spark questions about what we are encountering out in the field or in archives. While some of my research has focused on the urgent questions of emerging drug use during the opioid epidemic, I am also interested in developing under-used theoretical approaches, particularly Cultural Theory. The new online Opioid Industry Document Archive also promises exciting new opportunities for research.  As well as work and family, I have spent many years researching cake making, particularly the chocolate varieties.

What drew you to this project?

Since reading Mary Douglas’ paper ‘The Self as Risk Taker: A Cultural Theory of Contagion in Relation to AIDS’ (1990), I have been intrigued about perceptions of risk and protection from HIV.  During research in Baltimore, Maryland in 2015, an interviewee commented that although they were engaged in sex work, they only went in their own circle. They saw this boundary as protective against HIV risk and it resonated with Douglas’ ideas about community boundaries as a protective barrier to contagion. I then developed this project as a pilot for investigating the use of Cultural Theory among people who use drugs

What was one of the most interesting findings?

Reducing HIV-related stigma is not only a matter of educating people to be more caring and empathetic. How someone reacts to another’s diagnosis depends on how they see their own place in the world. When unable to control key aspects of their lives, such as where they sleep at night or because of the daily demands of drug dependence, a person may develop a fatalistic viewpoint. From a public health point of view, fatalism can make preventing HIV particularly challenging if people who are considered ‘at risk’ believe the spread of the virus is out of their hands but fatalism may also help them to live in harsh conditions without self-blame and reconcile themselves to difficult news.

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now?

I have been enjoying the BBC podcast of ‘In Our Time’, a discussion with academics of wildly disparate topics from the electron to the origins of the Atlantis myth or George Orwell’s 1984. For viewing, Shetland, a crime drama set on remote Scottish islands, is good for relaxing at the end of the day. For the written word, I recently read an excellent paper by Allison Schlosser and Lee Hoffer that discusses grief after deaths from drug overdose, a previously overlooked subject. (Schlosser, A. V., & Hoffer, L. D. (2022). “I don’t go to funerals anymore”: how people who use opioids grieve drug-related death in the US overdose epidemic. Harm Reduction Journal, 19(1), 1-11.)

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

There is usually an internal logic to even the most bewildering human behavior but it may take some persistence to discover it.

Other places to connect:
University of California, San Francisco
ResearchGate

The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Julie Spray is a Lecturer in Children’s Studies at the University of Galway. She is an interdisciplinary medical and childhood anthropologist who researches children’s perspectives on health and illness, public health policy and interventions, and health inequalities. She is author of The Children in Child Health: Negotiating Young Lives and Health in New Zealand (Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies, 2020).

Jean Hunleth is an ASsociate Professor in the Division of Public Heath Sciences at the Washingtion University School of medicine in St. Louis. She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology and a Masters of Public Health. Her work focuses broadly on care and caregiving across hospital and home settings in the United States and in Zambia. She is the author of Children as Caregivers: The Global Fight against Tuberculosis and HIV in Zambia (Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies, 2017)

What is your article “Breathing Together: Children Co-constructing Asthma Self-Management in the United States” about?

Paediatric professions tend to be oriented around adult caregivers in biomedical approaches to illness management, leaving children marginalised as passive “shadows” in things like policies, guidelines, and clinical models. But the anthropology of child health suggests children are active participants in their health who derive their own self-care practices. So in this article we shift the lens away from caregivers to center children, asking, what are children’s roles in their asthma management? We asked 24 children to show us how they manage asthma, contrasting their accounts with those of 12 health care providers. We heard from children how they actively co-construct their own “protocols” for dealing with asthma with a range of other actors, through relational processes of care and responsibility, and within the spatial contexts and constraints of everyday childhoods. We suggest children’s activities—which are largely absent from asthma guidelines—are foundational to successful asthma management.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.   

We are both scholars working at the nexus of childhood and medical anthropology. Jean’s current studies are multiple, including a study of young people’s caregiving for adult cancer patients in the US, a study on bedside caregiving in a pediatric hospital in Zambia, a project to implement HPV vaccination into adolescent health services in Zambia, and a photographic examination of children’s experiences with health and care in the rural Midwest (US). These studies may seem quite different, but they are united by an interest in learning from young people to better understand care (in its varied definitions).

Julie has continued her long-term focus on paediatric asthma through a New Zealand based project about how health professionals, adult caregivers and children are differently thinking about children’s roles and responsibilities in asthma management. Additionally, her comic-making project The Pandemic Generation has investigated children’s representation inclusion and participation in Covid-19 public health promotion in New Zealand and, in the near future, Ireland.

What drew you to this project?

We were the two childhood medical anthropologists on an NIH-funded interdisciplinary team investigating caregiving for paediatric asthma. This article is the product of our relentless harping to the rest of the team that children matter too. The team very graciously trusted us to run a subproject working with the children of caregivers who had been previously interviewed for the main grant.

What was one of the most interesting findings?

Neither of us were surprised by our findings, because we knew from our respective previous child-centered projects children have agency and engage in their own self-care practices, and that those practices will be overlooked and underestimated by adults. But one thing we hadn’t expected was the role of drinking water in children’s protocols—so many of the children described drinking water as a firstline response to asthma symptoms. Adult caregivers had described a huge range of their own strategies but almost adult had mentioned water. We think this speaks to how much more constrained children are in their own health management—some of them couldn’t easily access inhalers at school, for example. Water is the one “health” product children have ready access to.

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now?

Julie is reading Danya Gablau’s new book “Food Allergy Advocacy: Parenting and the Politics of Care” and thinking there are many parallels with asthma, and also food allergy would be another important area to investigate children’s own practices.

I (Jean) am reading The Scent Keeper by Erica Bauermeister. I find myself drawn to fiction narrated by child characters, and also fiction that offers new ways of thinking and writing about experience. The focus on scent is compelling to me as an anthropologist because my methods are so multisensorial. I think with fragrances often but haven’t quite figured out how to write them into my work.

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

To critically consider how adult-centric their thinking is! The naturalisation of age-based bias is one of the few forms of prejudice that still seems unchecked. When we assume children are passive and caregivers are the only people that matter, that children cannot and ought not be responsible for their own health care, or that children’s activities are just “training” for future adulthood and inconsequential to the health of the present child, we do children a huge injustice and leave them without important supports for the roles they must and do play in their own health.

Thank you for your time!

Other ways to connect:
Website (Julie Spray) (Jean Hunleth)
Twitter (Julie Spray) (Jean Hunleth)

The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.

Boon-Ooi Lee, Ph.D., is Senior Lecturer at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He is interested in culture and mental health, in particular, indigenous healing systems, multicultural therapy, cultural psychopathology, alteration of consciousness, health beliefs, somatization, embodiment, and phenomenology.

What is your article “Spirit Mediumship and Mental Health: Therapeutic Self-Transformation among Dang-kis in Singapore“ about?

Early studies usually described spirit mediums as people with mental disorders because of their psychiatric-like behaviors, for example, dissociation, delusions, or hallucinations. But subsequent studies found that mediums were generally in good physical and mental health. To find out whether these positive findings are generalizable to dang-ki healing, a form of Chinese mediumship / shamanism in Singapore, we interviewed eight mediums and assessed their mental health status using psychological questionnaires. Our findings suggest that most of them did not suffer from mental disorders. In fact, they had spiritually transformed through the practice of mediumship, suggesting that dang-ki healing has therapeutic values for the practitioners themselves. It is therefore important to understand mediumship in its cultural context instead of pathologizing it from a Western psychiatric perspective.

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.

I am a counseling psychologist and researcher. I have always been fascinated by the cultural aspects of psychopathology, mental health, and alteration of consciousness in ritual healing. Research in these areas helps us to understand better the interaction between mind and culture.

What drew you to this project?

I became interested in the relevance of rituals and other indigenous practices to mental health after a relative shared with me her personal story. When she was a child, her mother took her to consult a fortune teller because of her frequent insomnia. According to the master, her sleep had been interrupted by a child spirit who wanted to play with her. To prevent the lonely ghost from entering her bedroom, he asked her mother to paste a talisman on their house entrance. Interestingly, my relative slept soundly after her mother followed the instruction. Whether her recovery is a placebo response, a coincidence or due to some unknown reasons, I don’t know. But I think some aspects of cultural beliefs can be integrated into mental health care or psychotherapy for people who subscribe to these beliefs. With this idea, I moved on to study dang-ki healing, a popular indigenous healing system in the Chinese Singaporean community.

Initially, I focused my research on people consulting dang-kis. Later, I became interested in the dang-kis’ own transformative experiences after reading a study on digital self-representation conducted by Yee, Bailenson and Ducheneaut (2009). They found that the characteristics of an avatar had shaped how a user behaved both inside and outside of a collaborative virtual environment. Although virtual online game differs from spirit mediumship in many aspects, I wondered whether the same transformation would happen to a medium who enacts the “role” of a deity in a particular context as some researchers have perceived spirit possession as a form of social role enactment. In this sense, the “deity” is like an “avatar” while the religious context functions as an online virtual environment. Since a deity usually represents an ideal self with positive qualities, I conducted the current study to find out if a dang-ki would transform by internalizing the divine qualities through recurrent possession.

This transformation may help to explain the therapeutic aspects of the mediumship practice. Although this seems to be the case based on our ethnographic study, I plan to conduct an experiment to triangulate this finding by using the technology of virtual reality to see if a person can modify her behaviors by embodying the disposition of a “deity”. For example, past research has found that immersive virtual reality may induce illusions of ownership over a virtual body (in this sense, a deity’s body).

What was one of the most interesting findings?

The possible internalization of the deity’s disposition, as mentioned earlier. This finding will help to understand the interaction between the mind and body in cultural context

What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now?

Mainly Western and Eastern philosophies such as phenomenology, existentialism, and Taoism. I am now reading “The Path: A New Way to Think about Everything” by Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh, “The Phenomenological Mind” by Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, and “How Forests Think: Toward An Anthropology Beyond The Human” by Eduardo Kohn. In the evening, I immerse myself in Tang Dynasty poems, sci-fi movies on Netflix, or Tess Gerritsen’s novels.

If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?

To be open-minded, do not stereotype or even pathologize anything we are not familiar with, learn from people from other cultures, and there are local knowledge and healing systems relevant to mental health care.  

Other places to connect:
ResearchGate