In this special feature on the blog, we’re highlighting recent book publications that have been submitted for review to Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry. This week, we’d like to give you a short overview of Sarah Pinto’s new book Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in Contemporary India, from the University of Pennsylvania Press (more information here: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15224.html)

Book cover image courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Press website

Released earlier this year, Sarah Pinto’s book chronicles the experiences of women at a number of different psychiatric care institutions throughout Northern India. Pinto questions the poor treatment of female patients, the licensing process for mental health caregivers in these settings, as well as the overprescription of psychoactive medications to Indian women. Pinto pays close attention to the ways women in particular experience difficulty and distress as the primary caretakers of their families and households.

The goddess Parvati, whom the book is in part titled after, represents intense love for someone far away that borders on, and becomes, a form of suffering. Pinto invokes the name of this figure as a way to remind us of the mental strain that familial love can cause, especially for the Indian women at the heart of her moving ethnographic account.

These brief summaries are intended to give our readers a glimpse into the newest academic publications that we’re excited to discuss in our journal and with our followers on social media. For a full list of books that have been submitted for review at CMP, click this link: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11013-014-9383-x. This page also has information regarding the submissions process for authors who’d like their academic releases reviewed in the journal, as well as information for those interested in composing a review. For more information on this process, please contact managing editor Brandy Schillace.