Special Issue Highlight: The Anthropology of Autism, Part 1

Posted by jknopes

The newly released June 2015 special issue of Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry addresses anthropological studies of autism from around the world, including the United States, India, and Italy. In this installment and the next entry on the blog, we will explore four articles published in the latest issue. This research spans the fields of disability studies, psychological anthropology, and medical anthropology, and touch on themes of identity, subjectivity, family caregiving, and community. Here, we will focus on two articles in this publication.

Parenting a Child with Autism in India: Narratives Before and After a Parent–Child Intervention Program

Rachel S. Brezis, et al.

Throughout India, there are limited social services and support networks for individuals with autism and their families. Furthermore, neurodiverse (and mentally ill) individuals have historically been cared for in private by family members in India, where they are hidden from the community and may be treated as a mark of shame on the household. However, despite these challenges, Indian parents of children with autism are increasingly seeking out professional programs that educate them about autism and appropriate caregiving strategies.

One such program in New Delhi, the Parent-Child Training Program (PCTP), evidences the changing view towards autism in India. The program aims to educate parents about autism and, in so doing, encourage them to educate others about the experience of raising a child with the condition. Parents bring their child to PCTP and learn alongside them. As the first program in India to provide such training, its examination proves essential in understanding the way that various populations (here in India) are now approaching the shifting landscape of autism.

Brezis and colleagues studied the PCTP to discover how the training was altering parents’ perceptions of autism and relationships with their children. They interviewed 40 pairs of parents at the beginning and end of the 3-month program, encouraging the parents to speak for five minutes without prompts regarding their child and their relationship to the child.

The authors found that parents who participated in the three-month program were less likely to describe their children in relation to an assumed “normality,” although mothers proved to be more likely than fathers to self-reflect on their relationship with their child. Similarly, while parents described their child’s behaviors no less frequently in the second and final interview, they did not note behavior in relation to other individuals’ behavior perceived as “normal.”

To learn more about this research, click here for a link to the article: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11013-015-9434-y

Custodial Homes, Therapeutic Homes, and Parental Acceptance: Parental Experiences of Autism in Kerala, India and Atlanta, GA USA

Jennifer C. Sarrett

Like Brezis et al, Sarrett also investigates Indian caregiving and parental experiences of autism, while comparing this context to autism and the family in the United States. In both cases, Sarrett asks how the home as space and place impacts the meaning of disability for people with autism. She interviewed seventeen caregivers in Atlanta and thirty-one in Kerala, and observed seventeen families in Kerala and five families in Atlanta who had also participated in interviews. Sarrett concludes that though there are some similarities in the constellation of autism-specific and biomedical services that may be available to Keralite and American families, the arrangement of households themselves drastically changes the way autistic children are cared for in each location.

In Kerala, for example, mothers serve as both full-time child caregivers as well as domestic laborers, often spending long hours washing clothes by hand and cooking from scratch. Keralite children with autism have few interactive toys that are specifically geared to engaging them, few devices that may control their movements and behaviors (such as baby gates) or assist them in communication (such as an electronic device that voices requests for food or other needs.) Such tools are common in Atlanta households. However, they have consistent household care from mothers who manage all domestic labor with no outside employment.

Households with autistic children in Atlanta, meanwhile, are specifically retrofitted for the needs of the child. There are picture cards that children may use to show caregivers and parents an item of food that they wish to eat, as well as a calendar in the kitchen or office that marks doctors’ appointments and family events geared for socialization with the autistic child. Baby gates, cabinet locks, and other safety devices ensure the child does not come into contact with household dangers (such as kitchen knives and cleaning solutions.)

In sum, these tools are designed to change and improve the behavior of the child. The home itself is structured to be a therapeutic space: requiring material and financial resources that Keralite families do not have to physically adjust their households. Instead, Keralite families focus not on improving or altering an autistic child’s behavior, but rather emphasize consistent caregiving for the child. In both cases, however, parents are committed to creating an environment (be it material or social) in which a child with autism can be integrated into the activities of the household, and thus into the family’s social world. Despite cultural, and certainly resource, differences between Indian and American families, they share a common commitment to building home support systems for their developmentally disabled children.

Click here to access the full text of this article: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11013-015-9441-z

To access all of the articles in this issue, click here: http://link.springer.com/journal/11013/39/2/page/1

June 2015 Issue Preview: Guest Editor M. Ariel Cascio, on Global Autism Studies

Posted by jknopes

Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry’s second installment of the year arrives June 2015. This special issue will address anthropological studies of autism throughout the world. To give our readers a preview of the upcoming issue, special issue guest editor M. Ariel Cascio, PhD joined our social media editor for an interview to discuss compiling the issue, what topics the articles will address, and new themes in the study of autism.

Can you tell us a little about the upcoming June 2015 special issue?

The special issue, “Conceptualizing autism around the globe,” shares anthropological (and allied field) research on autism in Brazil, India, Italy, and the United States. We talk about “conceptualizing” autism as a way to counter the idea that autism “is” or “means” one specific thing. Sometimes autism means the diagnosis measured by a certain instrument (such as ADOS), sometimes it means a more broadly defined set of characteristics (such as those in the DSM), sometimes it means an individual identity, and so many more things. The articles in this issue explore how autism is conceptualized at several different levels: in national policy, in treatment settings, and in the home.

What’s been your favorite part of working on the special issue?

I’ve just enjoyed the opportunity to greater familiarize myself with the group of scholars who are pursuing the anthropology of autism, and to work alongside scholars whose work I have long followed.

So how did you become interested in the study of autism?

I’ve been studying autism since 2008. I actually came to anthropology before I came to autism, and when I first began learning about autism, I saw it as rich for anthropological inquiry (isn’t everything!) because of anthropology’s strengths in focusing on lived experience, challenging deficit narratives of so-called “disorders,” and placing medicine and psychiatry in sociocultural context.

What was it like doing fieldwork in Italy? How do Italians see autism differently than other places in the world?

I’ve studied the autism concept more in Italy than in any other place in the world, and I’m very grateful to everyone there from whom I learned – autism professionals, family members of people with autism, and people on the spectrum themselves. I could hazard comparisons with the literature that address perceptions in other parts of the world – and some of these comparisons come through in the special issue – but for now I would like to focus on the strength of the rich description of the Italian context without external comparison. As my article in the special issue shows, autism professionals tended to take a social model of autism, focusing on creating environments that were tailored to the needs of people on the spectrum and structured to help them learn.

What are some of the challenges you’ve faced in studying autism?

As in many areas of inquiry familiar to readers of CMP, it can be challenging to communicate information about my study to people who study autism in other fields (clinical, psychological, social work, etc.). A lot of research about autism takes a positivist stance, whereas my research takes an interpretivist stance and focuses on autism as a concept whose meaning may vary rather than a diagnosis measured in a particular way. Nonetheless, I love talking about my research interests with a broad audience because in many contexts (especially in the U.S.), so many people have personal or professional interest in autism and we can always have interesting and stimulating conversations.

What’s something you think would surprise non-anthropologists about the anthropology of autism?

I would imagine non-anthropologists would be surprised by the anthropology of autism for the same reasons they might be surprised by anthropology (or medical anthropology) in general. For example, they might be surprised that anthropologists study autism all over the world, particularly if they think of the autism concept as something that represents a universal set of characteristics and experiences that are unaffected by context. The articles in this special issue really show that context matters in all conceptualizations of autism, from Brazil to the United States, from national policy to the family home.

Where do you see the anthropology of autism heading next?

I see the anthropology of autism becoming more inclusive. In her commentary, Pamela Block expresses optimism that the anthropology of autism will increasingly include researchers who identify as autistic themselves, and I agree. In addition to including more researchers with autism, I anticipate that the anthropology of autism will increasingly work to include participants with higher levels of support needs (those whom some people call “people with low-functioning autism”), and delve deeper into their lived experiences as well.

Many thanks to Dr. Cascio for sharing her insights! Look for the special issue on conceptualizing autism in June 2015, and be sure to check back for more previews of the issue, article features, and other blog entries about the new installment here on our website.

From the Archive: Eating Disorders Amongst Japanese Women

Posted by jknopes

In our “From the Archive” series, we revisit an article published in past issues of Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry. This week, we’re highlighting a piece on eating disorders in Japan, originally featured in our December 2004 issue.

Kathleen Pike and Amy Borovoy’s article “The Rise of Eating Disorders in Japan: Issues of Culture and Limitations of the Model of ‘Westernization'” makes a poignant case for the importance of context when examining eating disorders across the world. In this piece, they argue that studies of eating disorders abroad have often attributed the etiology of these illnesses to an increasing visibility and presence of Western beauty standards that accompany the spread of new technologies, medias, and communication tools. While Western beauty ideals have been problematically exported to the non-Western and developing worlds in other cases, Pike and Borovoy suggest that this model does not account for the experience of eating disorders in Japan.

Westernization and modernization, they note, are two distinct processes: and Japan, which has developed economically but retained many of its traditional social roles, exemplifies this difference. Modernization is the process of economic and technological development as a nation shifts from traditional to modern (often, mechanized). Westernization may be defined as the process of integrating the lifestyle, values, and experiences of Western cultures into the fabric of society, especially during periods of modernization and economic change.

Despite the drive for modernization, Japanese women are still expected to be homemakers and mothers rather than career women in the new economy. The Japanese have not adopted the individualistic and feministic sensibilities of the Western world, and the domestic burden– both caring for the home and children, and tending to older family members– squarely falls upon wives and mothers. This creates enormous stress for young women, who wish to extend their adolescent years and savor the freedom between childhood and their adult lives, as defined by marrying and becoming a homemaker. Modernization allows young Japanese women to obtain jobs, travel widely, and earn an education, but traditional social roles do not create a space for women to enjoy such a designated period of freedom without familial commitment. The inevitability of domestic life, then, is ever-present in the lives of women who yearn for fewer responsibilities– even if just for a time. This creates feelings of distress, unease, or unhappiness in many young women.

Pike and Borovoy observe that Japanese women do not reject food (anorexic behavior) or induce vomiting (bulimic behavior) out of a desire for thinness or due to fat phobia, as women with eating disorders almost universally experience in Western nations. Rather, Japanese women stress that they reject food because it worsens their digestive complaints, which are connected to the anxiety and stress they feel out of dissatisfaction with their social role (or lack thereof.) The tension between women’s expected social functions, and their desire to live and work in some other way, therefore spurs disordered eating within this broader frame of mental distress.

As we see, women’s experiences of Japanese eating disorders are entwined in the fabric of traditional social life, and not rooted exclusively in imported ideas of the body, independence, and individualism per the Western way of life. Indeed, the non-fat phobic symptomatology of eating disorders reflects the essential differences between Japanese women with eating disorders and their peers in Western nations. The study highlights the centrality of culture in studies of mental illness, and the way that these conditions emerge out of a local social world.

To find the full article online, click here: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11013-004-1066-6

Vol. 39 Issue 1 March 2015: Medicalizing Heroin

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In addition to our From the Archive series, where we highlight past articles in the journal’s history, the CMP blog features selected previews of our latest issue. This week, we again take a sneak peek into an article from the March issue: the first installment of 2015’s Volume 39 of Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry.

Heroin: From Drug to Ambivalent Medicine

On the Introduction of Medically Prescribed Heroin and the Emergence of a New Space for Treatment

Birgitte Schepelern Johansen • Katrine Schepelern Johansen. Pages 75-91. Link to article: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11013-014-9406-7

This article examines the reintroduction of heroin as a medicine, as opposed to illicit drug, in the treatment of substance abuse patients. Unlike existing research on this topic, the authors here emphasize the exchanges between the users, the staff, and the material space of the implementation of heroin: the built and organizational environments of the clinic, rather than just the actors in this space alone.

Heroin exists in a complicated place in these clinics: it is (paradoxically) utilized to minimize addiction to it. Rather than marginalizing the drug, this process of managed heroin prescription lends the drug a central place in the lives of users and staff, albeit a place that ambivalently lies between drug use as pleasure and drug injection as a form of medicalized control.

When considering the rooms in the clinic where the staff injects heroin into clients, the authors note that the space is strictly regulated. Staff observe incoming clients, while those who carry out injections do not permit the patients from selecting where the drug is administered. Likewise, this clinical space is not used for socializing: clients don’t casually talk while waiting, and typically depart this area and linger in the facility’s more casual cafe after receiving their injection. The clinical space removes the use of heroin from the context of pleasure-seeking, and assumes control for the drug’s use. Although the substance is the same, heroin users’ experiences of the drug in recreational settings is deliberately set apart from its use in the clinic.

Yet distinguishing the clinical space where heroin is injected, while no doubt increasing medicalized control over the substance, also complicates the notion of the drug as unquestionably destructive. Clients move into a social, casual environment in the cafe after initial injection. Even the clinical space itself underscores the intimacy of intravenous drug use, as staff and clients engage one-on-one during the injections. The staff similarly struggle with the complex nature of heroin as an illegal drug, made most evident by the strict safeguarding of the location where heroin is stored.

Although the medicalization of heroin abuse may serve to diminish the criminal stigma surrounding use of the drug, medical models of treatment remain entangled in older ideas of substance illegality, criminality, and the stringent enforcement of substance abuse policies. Conversely, the clinical treatment space and its organization is arranged in such a way that muddies the boundary between pleasure and treatment. The authors thereby illustrate the complexity of moving towards a medical model of heroin treatment, and how notions of control evolve with the changing landscape of substance abuse policy.

Vol. 39 Issue 1 March 2015: Ethnography & Clinical Practice

Posted by jknopes

In addition to our From the Archive series, where we highlight past articles in the journal’s history, the CMP blog features selected previews and sneak peeks into our latest issue. This week, we gain a glimpse into an article from the March issue: the first installment of 2015’s Volume 39 of Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry.

A Model for Translating Ethnography and Theory into Culturally Constructed Clinical Practices

Bonnie Kaul Nastasi, et al. Pages 92-120. Link to article: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11013-014-9404-9

In this article, Nastasi and colleagues have developed a new model for preventative care of HIV and STIs over the course of a 6-year research project in Mumbai, India. This clinical approach, called the Narrative Intervention Model (NIM), implores married men in Mumbai to construct narratives around their sexual health and related problems. With the clinician, patients then deconstruct the narrative to locate discrepancies between their accounts of sexual health and their desired health status. The last stage of the preventative approach entails clinicians coaching patients on how to minimize risk while meeting patient expectations surrounding sexual health. In this way, health counseling becomes a more dynamic process than medical history taking alone.

The NIM model in this initial study was employed by both allopathic physicians and traditional Indian medical practitioners. By analyzing patients’ accounts and creating models for health behavior that minimized risks of HIV or STIs, caregivers were able to blend an anthropological and public health approach to preventative medicine. Likewise, the model drew on principles of cognitive behavioral psychology: inquiring about patients’ logic in rationalizing health choices, and intervening in this narrative to display where risks might be prevalent.

In the NIM model, the clinician’s interview with the patient takes on a semi-structured form (which the authors assert is “ethnographic” in nature.) Rather than traditional history-taking, which is an elicitation of information from the patient rather than a more fluid conversation, the NIM encourages patients to make connections between their cultural beliefs, behaviors, and their health.

Given the widespread interest in both medicine and anthropology on patient-clinician communication, this case presents an informative glance into how caregivers might draw on ethnographic practices to improve patient health. NIM offers one methodology for meaningful exchanges between clinicians and patients, and unites the aims of medicine and anthropology in illuminating culturally specific health behaviors, beliefs, and practices for the direct benefit of patients.

From the Archive: Biotechnology and the Culture of Medicine

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In the “From the Archive” series, we highlight articles published throughout the journal’s history. We look forward to sharing with our readers these samples of the innovative research that CMP has published on the cultural life of medicine across the globe.

In this installment of From the Archive, we turn to Mary-Jo Delvecchio Good’s article The Biotechnical Embrace (Vol 25 Issue 4, December 2001.) In this piece, Delvecchio Good frames three concepts in the cultural study of biomedicine: medical imaginaries, biotechnical embraces, and clinical narratives. Here, we will briefly outline these notions.

The medical imaginary, we learn, is the envisioned potential of the new technologies and treatments that medicine could produce in the future. The power of possibility in this sense impacts both clinicians, who are always working to stay ahead of new scientific knowledge, and patients: often those afflicted with diseases for which no current remedy exists. The medical imaginary situates medical progress in a position of hope and opportunity. Stories of medical failure, malpractice, or dearths of medical knowledge, although evidence contrary to establishing an “optimistic” view of the field, are framed in an overarching positive narrative of scientific progress.

Delvecchio Good next describes the biotechnical embrace: the embracing of, and the “being embraced” by technical innovations. This refers to the public “enthusiasm” for biotechnical therapies, as well as the engagement of biotechnologies with the patient’s body. Like the medical imaginary, the biotechnical embrace concept recalls a biomedical commitment to scientific progress and possibility. Even whenever a treatment is highly experimental, not yet approved as effective, or so new that its pitfalls are not fully known, patients will ’embrace’ and request it– and the public will hastily invest in it.

Lastly, we parse the concept of the clinical narrative, or ethnographic frame. This qualitative data is what evidences popular and clinical enthusiasm for bioscientific innovation and the use of the latest technological treatments.

Put simply, narratives can demonstrate that patients and clinicians alike are able to frame care in terms of the gap between what is presently the case, and what might be. For instance, a cancer patient might note the gaps between their condition, current treatments they have used, future therapeutic options, and subsequent clinical outcomes for his or her illness. Clinical narratives remind us that patients (and caregivers) do not view medicine as a static database of information, but instead a dynamic and progressive body of knowledge that exists in relation to illness experiences.

Click here for a link to the abstract and further details about the paper: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A%3A1013097002487

Current Issue Highlight: Vol. 38 Issue 4, December 2014

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In our “Current Issue Highlight” series, we provide brief synopses of some of the original articles and commentaries published in our latest issue of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry. We hope these glimpses into our recent publications serve as a taste of the research we publish, as well as offer fresh insights on the intersections of culture, disease, health, and healing.

“The Ethics of Ambivalence and the Practice of Constraint in US Psychiatry”

Paul Brodwin

“This article,” the abstract begins, “investigates the ambivalence of front-line mental health clinicians toward their power to impose treatment against people’s will.” Ambivalence is itself a psychological construct that describes the tensions between love and hate, or multiple perspectives, within both individual subjects as well as the collective social group: here, psychiatric health workers. Central to this article is the friction generated between the clinicians’ self-concept as caregivers and their professional drive to control patients. Such ambivalence about clinical work in psychiatry is evident in the ethnographic research presented here.

Brodwin’s piece reminds us that anthropology is perfectly situated to draw meaning from these problematic and conflicted perspectives within a social group. Rather than reconciling the participants’ feelings and drawing one universal message from them, Brodwin presents us with an authentic picture of the complicated world of clinical psychiatric practice. He concludes, “To understand the paradox, fieldwork should focus especially on the moments when people’s sense of unease erupts into collective life.”

Link to article: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11013-014-9401-z

“A Village Possessed by ‘Witches’: A Mixed-Methods Case–Control Study of Possession and Common Mental Disorders in Rural Nepal”

Ram P. Sapkota, et al.

In this article, the authors probe an important question: if we consider spirit possession and psychopathology as separate categories, rather than assume possession as a form of mental illness, how might we describe mental illness within a population who has experienced spirit possession? For societies in which spirit encounters are frequent and socially normative, reading mental illness as distinct from possession is particularly critical when exploring local psychic events.

Nepal provided fertile intellectual grounds for exploring this question because spiritual possession occurs regularly. When the researchers delivered educational sessions on psychosomatic and psychosocial illnesses, suggesting that spirit possession might be a type of mental distress, villagers in the study resisted this notion. They argued that possession was rooted in cosmological and supernatural disturbances, making them altogether different psychological phenomena.

Instead of casting possession as a brand of psychiatric illness, the authors suggest that we might view possession as a coping mechanism against other mental duress. In another way, we could conceive of possession as a cultural idiom of distress: reframing illness in terms of a socially acceptable category of experience that is widely shared.

Link to article: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11013-014-9393-8

“Confinement and Psychiatric Care: A Comparison Between High-Security Units for Prisoners and for Difficult Patients in France”

Livia Velpry & Benoît Eyraud

Focusing on French mental health care, this article explores the evolving use of confinement as part of the treatment of mentally ill individuals who exhibit violent behavior. The authors parallel the nature of confinement in French psychiatric wards to the security practices of high-security prison units.

In their research, Velpry and Eyraud discovered that the public appeal to heightened security in psychiatric institutions, as well as executive action from the president, led to a “turn” towards new confinement measures. Second, psychiatrists used this new narrative of control to justify control techniques that they argued gave patients “psychic structure.” Rather than standing as its own therapeutic measure, physicians employed confinement as a means of managing “difficult” patients.

As an object of inquiry, this recent trend in French psychiatry recalls the complementary trajectories of care and justice, power and control, as well as reflects on the changing landscape of what we define as therapy.

Link to article: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11013-014-9400-0

“Psychiatry with Teeth: Notes on Coercion and Control in France and the United States”

Anne M. Lovell & Lorna A. Rhodes

This commentary piece on the articles published in the current issue highlights the “rough edge” of the use of constraint and coercion to subdue “difficult” psychiatric patients. Lovell and Rhodes note that many of the articles demonstrate how these forms of discipline and control are enacted at the local scale, and remind us that the exchange between psychiatric patient and the care institution is the site of the strongest conflict when we look at systems of control. What is the border between “care and custody,” the issue asks? How do we as anthropologists contribute to the knowledge about these complex social interactions?

Furthermore, the authors observe that the geographic emphasis on psychiatric care in France and the United States is hardly accidental. Although care practices for the mentally ill differ widely between the two countries, the focus on constraint and control is similarly present in the scholarly literature produced on psychiatry in each place. Likewise, in French and American research, there is a mutual tendency to study mental health care in terms of autonomy, freedom, humanism, and democracy.

Link to commentary: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11013-014-9420-9

Want to see a preview and abstracts of all the articles in the current issue? Find details on the full issue here: http://link.springer.com/journal/11013/38/4/page/1

From the Archive: Caregiving and Dementia in Urban India

Posted by jknopes

In the “From the Archive” series, we will highlight articles published throughout the journal’s history. We look forward to sharing with our readers these samples of the innovative research that CMP has published on the cultural life of medicine across the globe.

Recently, one of our readers on the Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry Twitter account requested that our next “From the Archive” post address an aspect of aging and community. In the spirit of the reader’s suggestion, this week we are featuring a 2008 article by Bianca Brijnath and Lenore Manderson entitled “Discipline in Chaos: Foucault, Dementia and Aging in India.” (you can find out more about the article here: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11013-008-9111-5.)

The authors posit that caregivers for those with dementia are important providers of structure: they are responsible for the patient’s hygiene, diet, and medical needs, as well as accountable for the actions of people who, experiencing symptoms of dementia, sometimes act out in ways which are not consistent with public cultural norms. Typically in India, such care falls into the hands of younger relatives. Domestic caregiving by these family members “prevents the demented body from threatening the stability of the social body.” There are tremendous “social anxieties,” the authors write, surrounding the potential for someone with dementia to resist normative behaviors per the local codes of social life.

The Foucauldian stream of thought here is quite present: the caregiver must “discipline” the body of the dementia patient to reinforce the cultural codes of the society in which both actors live. Although there exists the notion of seva, or the submission of younger relatives to the direction and advice of older relatives, this idea of the respected and powerful elder is complicated in the face of dementia where the power to attend to another person is rather reversed. Instead of being disciplined by the familial patriarchs or matriarchs, younger relatives must both discipline the elder who is unable to provide the social structure for themselves, as well as their own bodies by taking on new routines and practices to accommodate their family member with the illness.

Power, however, is still bi-directional: those with dementia have extraordinary power in altering the routines of their familial caregivers, and even act out violently: the authors note they may “kick, hit, punch, bite, and threaten with a weapon” when they are upset, and are not necessarily expected to limit these actions on their own due to their condition. The transactions of power, agency, and authority in these relationships are resonant with similar social exchanges as explored via the Foucauldian lens in other Western settings.

Brijnath and Manderson’s piece highlights important features in the care of dementia patients, and demonstrates that community-based models of caregiving for the elderly are not as simple as the removal of power from the elderly individual and the installation of authority in the caregiver. The caregiver, too, is both self-disciplined and disciplined by the acting out of their ward.

Publication Highlight: “Online First” Articles (Oct 2014), Part Two

Posted by jknopes

Welcome to the second installment of this series. The following collection of articles are from our “Online First” file at our publisher’s website: http://link.springer.com/journal/11013. The full text of these articles will be released in upcoming issues of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, but here we’d like to lend our readers a glimpse into the innovative research in medical anthropology and social medicine that the journal publishes.

Clicking the title of each paper will send you to the “Online First” page for each article, including a full list of authors and abstracts.

Confinement and Psychiatric Care: A Comparison Between High-Security Units for Prisoners and for Difficult Patients in France

Livia Velpry & Benoît Eyraud

Learning Constraint. Exploring Nurses’ Narratives of Psychiatric Work in the Early Years of French Community Psychiatry

Nicolas Henckes

The Ethics of Ambivalence and the Practice of Constraint in US Psychiatry

Paul Brodwin

Between Jewish Settlers and Palestinian Citizens of Israel: Negotiating Ethno-national Power Relations Through the Discourse of PTSD

Keren Friedman-Peleg

Publication Highlight: “Online First” Articles (Oct 2014), Part One

Posted by jknopes

The following collection of articles are from our “Online First” file at our publisher’s website: http://link.springer.com/journal/11013. The full text of these articles will be released in upcoming issues of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, but here we’d like to lend our readers a glimpse into the innovative research in medical anthropology and social medicine that the journal publishes.

Clicking the title of each paper will send you to the “Online First” page for each article, including a full list of authors and abstracts.