AAA 2017 Session Highlight: Jonathan Metzl, “Negroes With Guns: Mental Illness, Gun Violence, and the Racial Politics of Firearms”

Posted by sonya.petrakovitz

This week on the blog we are highlighting an oral presentation given at this year’s annual American Anthropological Association conference in Washington D.C. by Jonathan Metzl entitled Negroes With Guns: Mental Illness, Gun Violence, and the Racial Politics of Firearms. The session was named “Critical Inquiries: Violence, Trauma, and the Right to Health” on Thursday, November 30, 2017. Metzl combined historiographical and ethnographic analysis to explore the connections between gun violence, mental illness, and shifting anxieties about race in the United States. Metzl discussed how decisions about which crimes American culture diagnoses as “crazy,” and which crimes it deems as “sane,” are driven as much by the politics and anxieties of particular cultural moments as by the innate neurobiologies of particular assailants. The presentation concluded by describing how racialized questions of whether “the insane” should be allowed to bear arms become the only publicly permissible way to talk about questions of gun control while other narratives, such as the mass psychology of needing so many guns in the first place or the anxieties created by being surrounded by them, remain silenced.

Metzl began his presentation by stating that after the recent and tragic Las Vegas mass shooting, he gave 58 interviews in only two days on “the insane politics of mass shootings.” The two main questions that get asked after each mass shooting are: “Is mental illness the cause of mass shootings?” and, “Will treating mental illness stop gun crime?” Both conservative and liberal media analyses include these types of questions, whether or not they ultimately claim mental illness as the answer (for example: NPR’s On Point, Politico, and Fox News).

Yet Metzl asked, why do these mental illness questions follow after mass shootings? “Aren’t these questions starting to be ridiculous?” Metzl asked, after referring to a study published in the journal Aggression and Violent Behavior which found some mass murderers and serial killers have something in common: autism and head injury. Yet this study was criticized for fueling judgments about an entire section of society and further contributing to the mental illness-gun violence debate.

In some ways, linking mass shootings and mental illness makes sense. Mass shootings are beyond the realm of “sanity” and understanding. Metzl stated that constructing a binary of sane vs. insane, good vs. evil, may be a means of processing grief and uncertainty. Further, many of the mass shooting perpetrators in the last decades have displayed some kind of mental illness symptomatology before their crimes. Mother Jones published an investigation of US mass shootings from 1982-2017 including information on the shooter’s race, gender, prior signs of mental health issues, mental health details, and whether or not the weapons were obtained legally. But this information cannot lead to a causal argument.

These types of questions have ideological and political roots, and focusing exclusively on issues of mental health force other concerns out of the debate. At a National Rifle Association (NRA) press conference in December 2012, chief executive Wayne LaPierre suggested having “an active national database for the mentally ill” would help prevent gun violence. In 2013, Ann Coulter wrote a Sound Off on Fox Nation entitled “Guns Don’t Kill People, The Mentally Ill Do.” After the 2015 Planned Parenthood shooting in Colorado Springs, Paul Ryan called for a need to look at fixing our nation’s mental illness health system, not it’s gun legislation. Most recently, following news of the mass shooting of parishioners at a Sunday service at a small Baptist church in Texas, Trump proclaimed mental health was the overarching issue, not gun control, even before complete details of the shooter were known.

Following this overview of political ideologies shaping the mental illness conversation, Metzl then asks, “What can reasonably minded people do to push back?”

Metzl then presented five talking points about important ways to push back against the mental-illness-and-mass-shooting account while still remaining respectful of mental illness, treatments, and medications. These talking points discuss why this association is problematic.

1. “It’s sample bias – and dangerously so…”: Mass shootings come to stand for all shootings. But mass shootings are not the only time we need to talk about gun violence, Metzl stated. When we talk about mass shootings, we are not talking about policy implications for everyday gun death. Every day gun violence, gun proliferation, the ability to buy guns through loop holes should all be part of the national conversation. Worryingly, Metzl states, the situation is about to get much worse. Today (Wednesday, December 6, 2017) the House will vote on a “concealed carry reciprocity” bill, creating a national blanket right to carry a concealed weapon across state lines. For Metzl, the point overall is that the mental illness narrative distracts from daily gun violence and the political negotiations behind gun regulations.

2. “It’s stigmatizing and misrepresentative…”: Fewer crimes involve people with mental illness. People with sanity are much more dangerous, Metzl stated. People diagnosed with a mental illness are less likely to shot other people, therefore we should really be restricting guns from the sane. Further, Metzl stated that statistically there is no predictive value in using a mental illness diagnosis for gun crime. Individuals with mental illness are more likely to be shot by police than to do the shooting themselves.

3. “It constructs false psychiatric expertise…”: Psychiatrists are being told they should be able to predict which of their patients may commit violent act. Yet the pool of people they see are not a high risk population. Metzl stated the public culture of fear may lead psychiatrists to feel culpable for the actions of their patients, over-report their concerns, and complicates the doctor-patient confidentiality bond. In the weeks before the Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting, shooter James Holmes was seeing a psychiatrist specializing in schizophrenia. In June 2012 The Brian Lehrer Show discussed how psychiatrists determine red flags with their patients and when behavior is concerning enough to warrant further action with Columbia University Director of Law, Ethics, and Psychiatry Paul Appelbaum.

4. “It detracts from awareness of true predictive factors for everyday gun violence…”: The mental illness narrative also detracts from other risk factors for everyday gun violence and mass shootings. Substance use or abuse, past history of violence, lack of gun training, social networks, and access to firearms are all important predictive factors for gun violence.

5. “It’s racist…”: Last but certainly not least, the construction of a mentally ill, dangerous, white, male, gun-owning “loner” is a political choice. The intentional presentation of the individual-isolated-from-society is not supposed to be representative of white culture. Yet in the 1960s, the FBI openly blamed “crazy” black “culture” for the rise of public black activist groups. In debates leading up to the Gun Control Act of 1968, the U.S. Government and mainstream US culture proclaimed links between African American political protest, guns, and mental illness in ways that intensified fears about black activist groups. For example, FBI profilers diagnosed Malcolm X with “pre-psychotic paranoid schizophrenia” and with membership in the “Muslim Cult of Islam” while highlighting his militancy and his “plots” to overthrow the government. The FBI also hung “Armed and Dangerous” posters throughout the southern states warning citizens about Robert Williams, the controversial head of the Monroe, North Carolina chapter of the NAACP author of a manifesto, Negroes With Guns, that advocated gun rights for African Americans. According to the posters, “Williams allegedly has possession of a large quantity of firearms, including a .45 caliber pistol… He has previously been diagnosed as schizophrenic and has advocated and threatened violence.”

These historical narratives were linked to black culture, not black individuals. Issues of race and insanity produced black male bodies coded as insane. This association fostered fears that helped mobilize significant public and political sentiment for gun control. Yet there are very different politics of the present day. Metzl states were are in a time when white shooters with mental illness beget reaffirmations of gun rights and groups that advocate anti-government platforms and support broadening of gun rights, such as the Tea Party, take seats in Congress rather than being subjected to police scrutiny. For much of our country’s history, guns marked whiteness.

Metzl concluded his presentation with a discussion of a helplessness narrative. There is a kind of inaction about calling mass shootings and gun violence part of mental illness. Since we can not do anything about whether or not individuals have mental illness, it allows us to ignore the other issues and risk factors. This further constructs a kind of persons, not a composition of something larger and more systemic. The learned helplessness surrounding gun crime in the US makes hard rhetorical work to not look at whiteness and mass culture as part of the problem.

Jonathan Metzl, MD, PhD is the Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Medicine, Health, and Society, Director for the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, and Professor of Psychiatry at Vanderbilt University. He is also the Research Director of the Safe Tennessee Project, a non-partisan, volunteer-based organization that is concerned with gun-related injuries and fatalities in the United States and in the state of Tennessee. His areas of expertise include mental illness and gun violence with a particular focus on gender and race.

Learn more about Jonathan Metzl at his website, available here.

Message from the AAA 2017 Annual Meeting

Posted by sonya.petrakovitz

The Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry editorial team sends our greetings this week from the American Anthropological Association 2017 Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. This year’s 166^th Annual Meeting will be held from November 29^th through December 3^rd, with session listings and other helpful information available here. The theme for this year’s meeting is Anthropology Matters!. We hope all of our readers attending the conference have safe travels to– and many productive conversations at– this year’s meeting! Next week we will feature highlights from one of the many excellent paper sessions.

As a reminder, we continue to accept guest blog submissions on topics spanning cultural, medical, and psychological anthropology and related disciplines in the social sciences and medical humanities.

Consider submitting an abbreviated version of your AAA conference presentation as a guest blog, or write a commentary on one of the keynote speeches at the event. We look forward to sharing the work and research of our readers with our colleagues on the blog! If you are interested in submitting a guest blog, please contact our social media editors, Sonya Petrakovitz at smp152@case.edu or Monica Windholtz at mmw106@case.edu for details.

Best wishes,

The CMP Editorial Team

Upcoming AAA 2017 Annual Meeting: Highlights of Scheduled Sessions

Posted by sonya.petrakovitz

This week on the blog we are highlighting two scheduled sessions at the upcoming American Anthropological Association 2017 Annual Meeting in Washington, DC from November 29^th through December 3^rd. Anthropology Matters!, the theme for the 116^th AAA Annual Meeting, is a call to unite the field of anthropology, to embrace difficulty, and to promote the persistent relevance of what anthropology is and does. As stated on the Annual Meeting website, available here, anthropology is best at describing the past, exploring the present, predicting the future, and navigating the processes of being and becoming human.

The first scheduled session highlighted is entitled Biomedical Subjectivities and Imagined Futures (2-0145) and features oral presentations by Kimberly Dukes, Markus Idvall, Leslie Carlin, Dana Ketcher, and Rebecca Grunzke. The second scheduled session is an Executive Roundtable session entitled Do Black and Brown Lives Matter to Anthropology?: Race, Bodies, and Context. This roundtable features John Jackson, Norma Mendoza-Denton, Aimee Cox, Jonathan Rosa, and Vanessa Diaz.

Biomedical Subjectivities and Imagined Futures (2-0145)

Wednesday, November 29^th – 12:00-1:45pm in Marriott Ballroom Salon 1

– Oral Presentation Session –

Kimberly Dukes (Co-Authored with Aaron Seaman) – University of Iowa

Title: “Let’s Take a Peek”: Looking At, For, and Away From Future Cancers

Abstract: This paper considers what it means to be living, for a time, “between” illnesses, a particular moment of what Lochlann Jain has called “living in prognosis.” How—ostensibly from a place of “health,” as some would define it—is one’s reckoning of the future shaped by prior experiences? Are there ways of imagining an embodied future other than the overdetermined eventuality of recurrence or other bodily breakdown? This paper contemplates how people who have been successfully treated for head and neck cancer envision themselves and their futures as they consider whether to undergo screening for lung cancer. Drawing on semi-structured, in-depth interviews with patients and providers at a Midwestern US academic tertiary care center, we explore the tension between some people’s reliance on surveillance as an active health practice and others’ comfort with uncertainty. As patients situate themselves in the space between cure and potential recurrence, they sometimes resist biomedical understandings of evidence, harms, and risks. As participants explore the costs—and even the perceived gifts—of cancer in their lives, they draw on other sorts of evidence, including fun lives and prices paid; personal and social narratives of cancer as something to be surveilled, cured, or merely interrupted; and the value of different kinds of knowing. Working in this context, then, the paper contributes to anthropological conversations about the ways that people make sense of the precarity of life, especially within a US biomedical landscape increasingly contoured by anticipatory conceptualizations of chronicity and risk.

Markus Idvall – Lund University

Title: Synchronizing Oneself with Science: How Individuals with Parkinson’s Disease Go Along with Clinical Trials

Abstract: Sweden has a long tradition when it comes to biomedical research on Parkinson’s disease. For example in the 1980s the first neuron cell transplantation to a Parkinson patient in the world took place in Sweden. Today Swedish Parkinson scientists, in collaboration with researchers in other countries, continue the search for a cure for Parkinson’s disease within several research fields. In the last years I have followed a biomedical research project in Sweden focused on realizing clinical trials with Parkinson patients within the field of cell transplantation. In my work I have conducted interviews with patients, researchers and medical staff as well as observations in hospital environments and in contacts with patient’s organizations.
My aim with this presentation is to explore what constitutes a clinical trial from the viewpoint of the patients. How does this biomedical research matter for trial-participating as well non-participating patients? How does one as patient follow and understand the clinical trials? How does one move along in relation to what one, on the basis of one’s degenerative illness, perceives as the progress of science? Individuals with Parkinson are, in this sense, temporal beings in whatever they do or calculate in relation to science. Taking part in clinical trials is viewed as a way of synchronizing one’s self with what one experiences as the tempo of practiced science. In my presentation I will explore different concepts for how a form of time sensitivity can be studied among patients.

Leslie Carlin (Session Chair, Co-Authored with Sonya Allin, Sarah Munce, Christine Ibrahim, Susan Jaglal) – University of Toronto

Title: Inside the BMD Black Box: Investigating the Performance and Production of Bone Material Density Tests

Abstract: Most research into the social context of bone mineral density (BMD) testing has focused on its consumers, mainly “older” women, and the effect of such tests on perceptions of aging bodies, in particular on the frightening risk of hip or other fragility fracture. BMD tests, which detect thinning (osteoporotic) bone, provide information on an invisible, painless, and otherwise unknowable aspect of bone health. From a health policy perspective, the cost of evaluating individuals’ fracture risk through such testing must be measured against both the expense of treating fracture patients and the trauma of injury. Between patient and policy, and very much under-investigated, is the material and social production of the BMD test itself, a procedure that often takes place in small (box-like) rooms using carefully calibrated machines operated by X-ray technologists with specialized training in BMD. In Ontario, Canada, the Ontario Health Insurance Program (OHIP) is a single-payer government-funded system that pays for BMD tests for individuals who meet OHIP’s eligibility criteria; these are based on a referring physician’s assignment of a “risk category.” In order to ensure reimbursement, the scanning facility’s intake staff must align the request with the OHIP risk designations, a process that is subject to judgement and error. “It’s always a hardship,” says one technologist. Using data from interviews with personnel at twelve scanning facilities in Ontario, we consider BMD testing as the creation of a ‘desirable’ artifact—the scan itself and the report created by the ‘reading physician’—in order to explore how a process, like a thing, can have a fluid and dynamic social life.

Dana Ketcher – University of South Florida

Title: Value of Genetic Testing and Counseling for Cancer Syndromes: Perspectives of Women at Genetic High Risk

Abstract: Genetic counselors might contend that the knowledge derived from the results of genetic testing (GT) for hereditary cancer syndromes is the primary characteristic that makes testing valuable. The knowledge and information gained from GT results inform cancer screening recommendations and potential prophylactic surgeries, as well as who (if anyone) in the patient’s family should also undergo testing. However, less is known about the value of GT as determined through the experiences and perceptions of patients – what I call the ‘folk knowledge’ of GT. This paper will discuss this ‘folk knowledge’ and the value assigned to GT and genetic counseling by women determined to be at high genetic risk for hereditary breast and ovarian cancer. While biomedicine places a premium on technology, how is that technology used and/or perceived by women who are exposed to it? Ethnographic research with women who have undergone testing, and also those who have refused, helps illustrate the ways in which women determine if, and what, kind of value GT has in their perspective.

Rebecca Grunzke – Mercer University

Title: Is There a Doctor in the Mouse? Proposing a Cyberethnography of Online Diagnosers

Abstract: In 2008, Microsoft conducted a study of Internet users’ experiences with web searches concerning medical concerns and self-diagnosis. The result was the first systematic study of cyberchondria, defined by researchers Ryen White and Eric Horvitz as the “unfounded escalation of concerns about common symptomatology, based on the review of search results and literature on the Web.” Researchers from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project reported in 2013 that 35 percent of U.S. adults say “they have gone online specifically to try to figure out what medical condition they or someone else might have,” referring to people who search for such medical information on the internet as “online diagnosers” (Fox and Duggan 2013). According to the Pew study, a total of 80 percent of Internet users, or about 93 million Americans, have searched for a health-related topic online, indicating that searching for health or medical information is currently one of the most popular online activities (Weaver 2013). This finding also provides significant support for both increased spending online by the health care industry to reach its consumers and the prediction by technology firm Jupiter Research that “health care companies will spend $1 billion online within the next five years” (Weaver 2013). With an estimated 24 million U.S. residents poised to lose health care coverage by 2026 under the current iteration of the American Health Care Act (Congressional Budget Office 2017), these numbers are likely to increase, much to the chagrin of some medical professionals responding to the trend of online diagnosis, who conclude that many people prefer Google over their doctors for medical advice (Samadi 2016). While attempting to self-diagnose at home and making decisions whether or not to seek a clinicians help are not new, websites giving medical advice are a recent edition to a household’s information resources (Fox and Duggan 2013). The Pew study found that women, younger people, white adults, those from households earning $75,000 or more, and those with a college degree or advanced degrees have a higher likelihood than their counterparts to go online to figure out a possible diagnosis (Fox and Duggan 2013). This study seeks to enhance the demographic and cultural profiles of online diagnosers using the tools of cognitive anthropology and social network analysis to compose a cyberethnography of this growing virtual community. The study’s theoretical orientation will emphasize the interplay between consensus theory and confirmation bias (the tendency for people to confirm what they already believe to be true, even in the face of evidence to the contrary), with particular attention to how each potentially informs the development of cyberchondria.

Do Black and Brown Lives Matter to Anthropology?: Race, Bodies, and Context (3-1225)

Thursday, November 30 – 4:15-6:00pm in Omni, Hampton

– Executive Roundtable Session –

John Jackson (Chair/Roundtable Introducer) – University of Pennsylvania

Norma Mendoza-Denton – University of California, Los Angeles

Aimee Cox – Yale University

Jonathan Rosa – Stanford University

Vanessa Diaz (Organizer) – Dartmouth College

In line with the 2017 AAA theme, “Anthropology matters!,” which invokes #BlackLivesMatter and the movements of other racialized and stigmatized groups, this roundtable offers a space for anthropologists to respond to how anthropology interacts with, strengthens, and/or stifles the movement(s) of people of color and other marginalized populations. More specifically, this roundtable will center around the question anthropologist John Jackson posed in his comments for the roundtable “Ferguson and Beyond” at the AAA 2015 annual meeting: Do Black lives matter to anthropology?

In the time since this provocative question was posed, the lives of Black folks, and people of color more broadly, have remained under attack by U.S. political, legal, and criminal justice systems. As this year’s call for papers asks us to bring panels to the table “that involve investigation, translation, influence, and action” to various parties, including “as an association (AAA and all the sections),” this roundtable offers the opportunity to address if and how anthropology has addressed Jackson’s question. This roundtable will explore various anthropological perspectives on race, the body, and the reality of white supremacy and racial hierarchies that are alive and well within anthropology, academia, and the U.S. on a national level.

By exploring such topics as racialized and gendered labor in the academy, racial profiling in various social realms, raciolinguistic politics, and how popular U.S. culture relates to and perpetuates racial hierarchies, we come together as anthropologists of color to insist that issues of race and racialization be at the forefront of contemporary anthropological inquiry. The panelists will identify the ways in which their research addresses contemporary struggles with inequality, discrimination, and other topics that should matter to anthropology, while at the same time offering examples of the ways in which anthropology as a discipline and AAA as an organization (and its members) can show that these struggles, and the discipline’s own relationship to colonialism and white supremacy do, in fact, matter to anthropology.

In the News: “Life After the Storm” and the Psychological Impacts of Hurricane Survivorship

Posted by sonya.petrakovitz

In our In the News post this week, we are discussing the lasting psychological impacts people face after surviving a large natural disaster event, such as the string of recent hurricanes battering the United States and the Caribbean. Building from a recent New York Times article by Benedict Carey entitled Life After the Storm: Children Who Survived Katrina Offer Lessons, available here, this post discusses how lasting damage from natural disasters can be much more than physical and economic.

September 2017. Benedict begins his article by sharing the story of Craig Jones, now 22 years old, who was in fifth grade when Hurricane Katrina in 2005 devastated his neighborhood of Pigeon Town in New Orleans. After spending years on the move, living between hotel rooms, Jones returned to New Orleans in his late teens. He remembers that “home” was not the same place he had left, and his “homesickness” became troubling anxiety and seemingly random panic attacks.

Lacey Lawrence, 22, at work in New Orleans. She escaped the floods of Hurricane Katrina on an air mattress. Now she teaches children coping skills. Credit: Annie Flanagan for The New York Times

Another survivor, Lacey Lawrence, now 22, escaped the water of Hurricane Katrina on an air mattress. Lawrence recalls the experience of seeing police officers pushing away floating bodies with oars, missing and uncle who presumably drowned, and wondering where a young cousin disappeared to for several hours. Later, at a new school, Lawrence was ill-equipped to deal with her experience. “I was getting into fights; real fights, violent ones. That was something I never did before, ever. But you lose everything and you don’t know how to deal with it – no one prepares you for that” (Benedict 2017).

Studying the psychological impacts from previous hurricanes may offer hints of what may be to come for those who have survived Hurricane Harvey, Irma, and most recently, Maria. Mental health providers and social scientists are acutely aware of the unpredictable traumatic consequences which can emanate from surviving natural disasters. Yet the impacts of surviving a hurricane may be unique.

Benedict (2017) writes, “Unlike an earthquake or a fire, flooding from a storm like Katrina or Harvey leaves many houses and buildings still physically standing but uninhabitable, simultaneously familiar and strange, like a loved one sinking into dementia.”

In a series of publications from the Stress & Development Laboratory at the University of Washington, the research teams concluded that the prevalence of “serious emotional disturbance” (SED) in young adults after exposure to Hurricane Katrina remained significantly elevated several years after their experience of the storm (McLaughlin et al. 2010). The prevalence of SED among young adults who experienced Hurricane Katrina was considerably greater than the pre-hurricane prevalence. According to a 2010 study, approximately 8% of youths were estimated to have SED that is directly attributable to their experience of the hurricane. Further, the majority of adults who developed posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after Katrina, including delayed onset PTSD, did not recover within 18-27 months (McLaughlin et al. 2011).

Prior to Hurricane Katrina, the majority of the literature focuses on the prevalence of and risk for the development of mental health problems following a storm or hurricane. For example, a study of the presence of PTSD symptoms after Hurricane Mitch in 1998 in a low-income area of Nicaragua found that the occurrence of PTSD in the areas with the least damage was 4.5%, while the most damaged areas was 9% (Davis, Tarcza, and Munson 2009). Variables such as low social support, prior exposure to traumas, and poor health status were found to be universally predictive of psychopathology symptoms (Davis, Tarcza, and Munson 2009).

A 2005 study by Fried, Domino, and Shadle looked at the use of mental health services after Hurricane Floyd in 1999 and found that visits to psychologists, licensed clinical social workers, and physicians for mental health reasons were higher in affected areas after the hurricane. However, inpatient admissions and the money spent on anti-anxiety medications decreased, indicating that there were likely problems with service delivery for those that did seek help (Davis, Tarcza, and Munson 2009).

Flooded homes are shown near Lake Houston on Aug. 30 after Hurricane Harvey hit the Houston area.
Photo from NPR: Win McNamee/Getty Images

In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, Texas officials were “scrambling to coordinate mental health support” and the state’s psychology board issued temporary practice licenses for out-of-state therapists (Benedict 2017).

In a recent CNN article, Jesse Cougle, an associate professor of psychology at Florida State University, said that the people who stared and witnessed the destruction of Hurricane Irma will likely experience worse mental health problems than those who evacuated (Scutti 2017).

Chief of emergency mental health and traumatic stress services branch at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Capt. Maryann Robinson, stated that “when you go home and now you are actually faced with what has happened — the devastation that has occurred in your home — it really does re-traumatize the individual” (Scutti 2017).

Overall, anticipating the consequences for major hurricanes should encompass more than disaster preparedness schemes and evacuations routes. Multi-state collaborations

Katrina’s young survivors, now older and reflecting on their experiences, say that “overcoming the mental strain of displacement is like escaping the rising water itself – a matter of finding something to hold onto, one safe place or reliable person, each time you move” (Benedict 2017).

References Cited:

Davis T.E., Tarcza E.V., Munson M.S. (2009) The Psychological Impact of Hurricanes and Storms on Adults. In: Cherry K. (eds) Lifespan Perspectives on Natural Disasters. Springer, New York, NY. Pp. 97-112. (Available here: http://stressdevelopmentlab.org/publications)

McLaughlin, K. A., Berglund, P., Gruber, M. J., Kessler, R. C., Sampson, N. A., & Zaslavsky, A. M. (2011). Recovery from PTSD following Hurricane Katrina. Depression and anxiety, 28(6):439-446. (Available here: http://stressdevelopmentlab.org/publications)

McLaughlin, K. A., Fairbank, J. A., Gruber, M. J., Jones, R. T., Osofsky, J. D., Pfefferbaum, B., … & Kessler, R. C. (2010). Trends in serious emotional disturbance among youths exposed to Hurricane Katrina. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 49(10):990-1000. (Available here: http://stressdevelopmentlab.org/publications)

Carey, Benedict. (September 8, 2017) Life After the Storm: Children Who Survived Katrina Offer Lessons. The New York Times. Available here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/health/katrina-harvey-children.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fhealth&_r=0

Scutti, Susan. (September 20, 2017) Resilience, suffering and silver liniings after a disaster. CNN. Available here: http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/19/health/psychological-aftermath-hurricanes-harvey-irma/index.html

Further Reading:

Davis III, Thompson, Amie Grills-Taquechel, and Thomas Ollendick. (2010) The Psychological Impact From Hurricane Katrina: Effects of Displacement and Trauma Exposure on University Students. Behav Ther 41(3):340-349.

Domonoske, Camila. (September 26, 2017) Long After The Hurricanes Have Passes, Hard Work – And Hazards – Remain. NPR. Available here: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/26/552063244/long-after-the-hurricanes-have-passed-hard-work-and-hazards-remain

Fothergill, Alice, and Lori Peek (2015) Children of Katrina. Austin: University of Texas Press. Available here https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/fothergill-peek-children-of-katrina

McLaughlin, K.A., Fairbanks, J.A., Gruber, M., Jones, R.T., Pfefferbaum, B., Sampson, N., & Kessler, R.C. (2009). Serious emotional disturbance among youth exposed to Hurricane Katrina two years post-disaster. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 48:1069-1078. (Available here: http://stressdevelopmentlab.org/publications)

Shear, M. K., McLaughlin, K. A., Ghesquiere, A., Gruber, M. J., Sampson, N. A., & Kessler, R. C. (2011). Complicated grief associated with Hurricane Katrina. Depression and Anxiety, 28(8):648-657. (Available here: http://stressdevelopmentlab.org/publications)

Book Release: “Fat Planet: Obesity, Culture, and Symbolic Body Capital”

Posted by sonya.petrakovitz

This week we are highlighting a recent book release from the University of New Mexico Press entitled Fat Planet: Obesity, Culture, and Symbolic Body Capital (2017), edited by Eileen Anderson-Fye and Alexandra Brewis. As a reminder, in June the CMP blog will be switching to our bi-weekly summer schedule.

Photo via UNM Press

The average size of human bodies all over the world has been steadily rising over recent decades. The total count of people clinically labeled “obese” is now at least three times what it was in 1980. Around the world, governments and other organizations are deploying urgent anti-obesity initiatives. However, one unintended consequence of these efforts to tackle the “obesity epidemic” has been the increasing stigmatization of “fat” people. This rapid proliferation of fat stigma has profound implications for both human suffering and disease. Fat Planet represents a collaborative effort to consider at a global scale what fat stigma is and what it does to people.

Making use of an array of social science perspectives applied in multiple settings, the authors examine the interplay of weight, wealth, history, culture, and meaning to fat and its social rejection. They explore the notion of symbolic body capital — the power of non-fat bodies to do what people need or want. They also investigate how fat stigma relates to other forms of bias and intolerance, such as sexism and racism. In so doing, they illustrate the complex and quickly shifting dynamics in thinking about fat — often considered deeply personal yet powerfully influenced by and influential upon the broader world in which we live. They reveal the profoundly nuanced ways in which people and societies not only tolerate, but even sometimes embrace, new forms of stigma in an increasingly globalized planet.

Chapters include:

Making Sense of the New Global Body Norms. Alexandra Brewis
From Thin to Fat and Back Again: A Dual Process Model of the Big Body Mass Reversal. Daniel J. Hruschka
Managing Body Capital in the Fields of Labor, Sex, and Health. Alexander Edmonds and Ashley Mears
Fat and Too Fat: Risk and Protection for Obesity Stigma in Three Countries. Eileen P. Anderson-Fye, Stephanie M. McClure, Maureen Floriano, Arundhati Bharati, Yunzhu Chen, and Caryl James
Excess Gaines and Losses: Maternal Obesity, Infant Mortality, and the Biopolitics of Blame. Monica J. Casper
Symbolic Body Capitol of an “Other” Kind: African American Females as a Bracketed Subunit in Female Body Valuation. Stephanie M. McClure
Fat Is a Linguistic Issue: Discursive Negotiation of Power, Identity, and the Gendered Body among Youth. Nicole L. Taylor
Body Size, Social Standing, and Weight Management: The View from Fiji. Anne E. Becker
Glocalizing Beauty: Weight and Body Image in the New Middle East. Sarah Trainer
Fat Matters: Capitol, Markets, and Morality. Rebecca J. Lester and Eileen Anderson-Fye

For more information, visit the University of New Mexico Press website, available here.

Dr. Eileen Anderson-Fye is a medical and psychological anthropologist, and the founding director of the Medicine, Society, and Culture (MSC) Master’s Degree track in Bioethics at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. Drawn to interdisciplinary study as an undergraduate, Dr. Anderson-Fye developed the MSC degree track for students to explore how factors beyond biomedical science contribute to health and wellness. Social and cultural constructs, historical and rhetorical influences, literature, and philosophy all shape perceptions of health, illness, and recovery, which in turn affect choices, beliefs, and behaviors. Those who appreciate this complex and multi-layered interplay will be able to play pivotal roles in enhancing how care is delivered – and the outcomes it yields.

Dr. Anderson-Fye’s perspective on these issues has been informed by extensive research on the mental health and well-being of adolescents and young adults in contexts of socio-cultural change. Her most enduring project is an ongoing longitudinal study of how subjective perceptions of current and future well-being allowed the first mass-educated cohort of Belizean schoolgirls to overcome severe threats to their mental and physical health. More recently, she led a team’s study of the psychiatric medication experiences of undergraduates at North American university campuses, where a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods revealed stark differences between reported and actual usage. Dr. Anderson-Fye is writing a book about the findings and their implications; it is tentatively titled, Young, Educated and Medicated. Dr. Anderson-Fye has an A.B. From Brown University in American Civilization. She earned her M.Ed. and Ed.D. in Human Development and Psychology from Harvard University. Her training has included work at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Social Medicine and Massachusetts General Hospital, and postdoctoral fellowships in Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture and Neuroscience and Culture, Brain and Development at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

Dr. Alexandra Brewis is a President’s Professor and Distinguished Sustainability Scientist at Arizona State University, where she also co-leads the translational Mayo Clinic-ASU Obesity Solutions initiative and serves as the associate vice president of Social Sciences. Her research interests includes how and why effective obesity solutions are undermined by weight stigma, damaging and distressing for millions of people and is rapidly spreading globally.

Dr. Brewis has a PhD in Anthropology from University of Arizona and was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation postdoctoral fellow in anthropological demography at the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University. Before joining ASU, she taught at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and University of Georgia. At ASU, Dr. Brewis served as Director of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change from 2009-2017.

From the Archive: “Exposure and Exclusion: Disenfranchised Biological Citizenship among the First-Generation Korean Americans”

Posted by sonya.petrakovitz

This week on the blog we are featuring an article from a past issue of the journal as part of our “From the Archive” series. In this highlight, we explore “Exposure and Exclusion: Disenfranchised Biological Citizenship among the First-Generation Korean Americans” by Taewoo Kim, Charlotte Haney, and Janis Faye Hutchinson, available here. This article was featured in Volume 36, Issue 4 (December 2012).

In the midst of an uncertain future of health insurance in the United States, it is important to reflect on how larger social systems affect individual experiences of health and illness. Our contributing authors at Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry frequently express the need for ethnographic approaches to healthcare analysis. In this article, the authors documented how the healthcare system in the United States in 2012 disenfranchised those of marginal health insurance status. Based on fieldwork with a highly uninsured and underinsured Korean American population, the authors argued that the vulnerability of these disenfranchised biological citizens is compounded through exposure to health risks and exclusion from essential healthcare.

According to the authors, the ﬁrst-generation Korean Americans interviewed faced the double burden of increased health risks from long, stressful work hours and lack of access to healthcare due to the prohibitive costs of health insurance for small business owners. Even as their health needs became critical, their insurance status and costly medical bills discouraged them from visiting healthcare institutions.

Based on a multi-sited ethnography of Korean–American communities in Houston, Texas, and Los Angeles, California, this study attempted to describe the condition of marginal insurance in the United States. The authors trace health risks among Korean Americans from “daily life to life in crisis.” By mapping the connections from an unequal social structure where risks are unevenly distributed, to the disproportionate prevalence of disease, the authors discuss the impact of inequality on the bodies of the disenfranchised population.

The authors build off of Nikolas Rose’s term biological citizen, defined as encompassing “all those citizenship projects that have linked their conceptions of citizens to beliefs about the biological existence of human beings.” The authors argued that their participants were left out of such developments and strategies due to the participants’ place in the employment structure and healthcare payment schemes. The high concentration of small business owners among the ﬁrst-generation Korean Americans led to long work hours in risk-laden conditions as well as high rates of marginal insurance driven by sky-rocketing private health insurance costs. These risks were compounded by limited access to appropriate preventive measures and medical intervention.

This combination of exposure to precarious working conditions and exclusion from healthcare increases Korean Americans’ vulnerability, particularly to chronic illnesses including hypertension, high blood cholesterol, diabetes, and heart disease. These conditions are the bio-devaluation that results from biological disenfranchisement.

Through detailed ethnographic research with uninsured and underinsured Korean Americans working in family-run businesses, the article focused on the daily practice of “doing-without-health,” pushing the discussion of barriers to healthcare-seeking toward an examination of how those barriers cultivate subjectivities of disenfranchised biological citizenship. The authors also describe how such disenfranchisement multiplies the participants’ vulnerabilities by exposing them to disproportionate health risks and excluding them from essential care.

First, the authors examined the daily-lived experience of risk exposure. Social and economic contexts of risk included the uneven distribution of economic activities and opportunities that Korean Americans face after immigration. The authors discussed several circumstances which contributed to social and economic risks, such as institutional barriers which disregarded educational attainments and professional experiences in South Korea, linguistic barriers, already difficult and stratified economics in the United States, stressed relationships with the surrounding communities, and fear of robbery and theft. These factors exposed the Korean American participants to health risks, such as overwork and stress, on a daily basis.

Second, the authors discussed how exclusion from care operated within the studied community settings. Uninsured and underinsured participants experienced discouragement from using healthcare services. A long-term uninsured status and widely circulated stories of ﬁnancially devastating medical bills create a distance between Korean Americans and healthcare institutions. Underinsured participants similarly encountered healthcare discouragement through high out-of-pocket costs. With tight budgets, underinsured participants feared the high cost of medical care and avoided visiting doctors.

Combined, these factors illuminated the embodiment of the social inequality among uninsured and underinsured Korean Americans; the authors linked exposure to health risks and exclusion from healthcare. Through an ethnographic examination of the daily practice of “doing-without-health” among a marginalized sub-group in society, the authors articulated how disenfranchised biological citizenship goes beyond creating institutional barriers to healthcare and shaping subjectivities of the disenfranchised.

Article Highlight: Vol. 41, Issue 1, “‘They Treat you a Different Way:’ Public Insurance, Stigma, and the Challenge to Quality Health Care”

Posted by sonya.petrakovitz

This week we are highlighting “They Treat you a Different Way:” Public Insurance, Stigma, and the Challenge to Quality Health Care by Anna C. Martinez-Hume, Allison M. Baker, Hannah S. Bell, Isabel Montemayor, Kristan Elwell, and Linda M. Hunt. The authors argue that stigma is a public health issue which should be addressed in Medicaid policy. Even though Medicaid eligibility is expanding to include more low-income adults, issues within the social context of public insurance and the experience of stigma may result in increased disparities in health care.

In this article, the authors examined the experiences of stigma when using public insurance as described by a group of low-income individuals eligible for Medicaid in Michigan and how such stigma influences their health-seeking behavior. Social scientists have long been concerned with the impacts of stigma on an individual’s social identity. Sources of stigma affecting health care experiences may include race, class, gender, and illness-status, all of which have serious consequences for health status. Underutilized care, delayed care, forgoing tests, infrequent check-ups, and lower quality of life have all been linked to health care stigma.

Patients in this study often reported stigmatization based on having public insurance, or no insurance, and reported feeling ignored, disrespected, or overlooked. As patients experience low satisfaction with their health care providers, the result is often missed follow-up appointments, changes in their providers, and reluctance to access necessary services. The authors discuss that groups who experience stigma in the health care system are most likely to be individuals who enter into the system as already stigmatized patients.

Racial categories within health care structures also distinguish between types of people, often leading providers to unknowingly treat some patients differently than others. The authors discuss how providers are taught through their medical training, published articles, and clinical guidelines to presume racial and ethnic groups share genetic, socio-economic, and cultural characteristics. These assumptions ignore complex social problems and highlight the multidimensional processes of differential treatment in health care.

Understanding the intersectionality of personal attributes, such as race or illness-status, and public insurance status can improve the appreciation for how experiences of stigma are compounded. Clinical encounters which manifest stigma have important health consequences for patients.

From their research, the authors explore participants’ stories about being treated differently while receiving Medicaid coverage and focused on two central stigma themes: receiving poor quality care, and experiencing negative interpersonal interactions.

One example of receiving rushed or poor quality of care comes from a woman named Destiny. She recounted her experience of taking her son to a clinic:

“The wait was an hour long…and then they were very quick with us, they didn’t take their time to ask questions…It’s like they weren’t patients, they were just another number, you know, to get them out the door, and the next one in… [The doctor] just sent us on our way without even fully understanding what the problem was… [My son] had a really bad cold or bronchitis and I told the doctor before he’s allergic to amoxicillin, penicillin, and he actually wrote him an amoxicillin script. It was in his ﬁle. He didn’t even read through his ﬁle.”

Mistreatment by staff or health care personnel based on public insurance status included shaming, being disrespected or ignored, not being believed, or being patronized. Shannon described her negative interpersonal interactions:

“When we had Blue Cross and Blue Shield, we were treated much differently even by the receptionist. People treat you differently. They look at you differently… I sometimes don’t want to pull out my green [Medicaid] card when I’m in the line at the pharmacy…the lady in front of me has a Blue Cross Blue Shield card and the way they talked to her or interact with her…is much different than when I roll up with my green card and my cardboard [Medicaid health plan] card. It’s ‘here, sign this, birth date, co-pay, have a great day.’”

These stigmatized experiences often lead to discontinuity of care and even resistance to returning to these facilities for care. The authors consider an especially concerning story from Carrie, whose stigma experience is amplified by her HIV-positive status:

“My doctor asked me to swab myself one time when I was being tested for STDs… How the hell can you work in infectious disease and you don’t want to swab me? Like okay, I can do that. But how humiliating is that? I’m switching doctors…I just don’t want to go. I want to be able to sit down and talk to somebody about what’s going on with me because I’ve been missing medicine, and that’s serious. It’s a serious thing, and they’re so callous to it.”

As the authors’ research elaborates, Medicaid use has long carried a stigma in the United States as a symbol of waste and excess of the welfare system. This carries with it a set of assumptions about the individuals who rely on these resources. The social construction of low-income individuals who enroll in Medicaid characterizes these people as lazy, willingly unemployed, less educated, and ultimately, undeserving. Inequitable health care received under the stigma of public insurance is fundamentally a public health issue, creating further disadvantages for the health of already vulnerable people.

Winter 2016 Blog Hiatus

Posted by jknopes

Dear readers,

In light of the winter holidays, the blog will be taking a brief break from new updates. Posts will resume in January 2017, under the direction of the new Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry Social Media Editor, Sonya Petrakovitz. We welcome Sonya into her new position and look forward to seeing the features that she will debut on the blog in the coming months.

As another year draws to a close, we would like to thank all of you for your continued readership and engagement with the journal and our social media.

Warm wishes,

The CMP Editorial Team

Interview: Incoming Social Media Editor Sonya Petrakovitz

Posted by jknopes

This week on the blog, we are featuring an interview with Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry social media intern Sonya Petrakovitz. Sonya will begin her tenure as the new social media editor on the journal’s blog, Twitter, and Facebook accounts in January 2017. As an intern, she has written an article highlight on Asperger’s syndrome, a conference feature, and a news piece on the Rio 2016 Summer Olympics.

Here, we discuss Sonya’s background, research interests, and vision for the journal in the months to come.

What is your academic background? How did you become interested in medical anthropology and humanities?

I began my interdisciplinary training in the humanities with Classical History, studying both the historical complexities of the Greco-Roman period, and the French war icons of the 1400s. While historical analysis is crucial to contextualizing culture and social change, I wanted to focus my studies more on the personal, individual aspects of daily experience in contemporary life. I then completed a second Bachelor’s in Photojournalism, bringing together intimate stories and visual narratives. I next spent a year working at an acute, inpatient psychiatric hospital for children and adolescents in Maine, mostly working with girls ages 12-18. Witnessing adolescents’ experience of illness and suffering further motivated me to want to understand subjectivity, personhood, and suffering in the context of medicine. I began my PhD studies in medical anthropology at Case Western Reserve University to pursue these interests. Both history and photojournalism seek to understand human experience, but anthropology has given me the theoretical frameworks and methodology that now characterize my research.

What are your research interests as a PhD student in medical anthropology?

My research is located at the intersection of globalization, decolonization, ethnomedical systems, identity, and tourism. Specifically, I study native medical systems in the context of tourism and modernization on the island of Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile.) Rapa Nui is an excellent place to study these intersecting processes and phenomena, particularly due to an unusual juxtaposition of simplistic tourist discourses of a fabricated “Easter Island” with the internal narrative of a historical struggle for self-determination. Situated on the most remote, inhabited island in the world, my research will investigate whether the ancestral medicine on Rapa Nui– practiced in indigenous exclusivity– could not only bolster health: its use may also be a symbolic form of resistance against post-colonial development. Expanding upon anthropological theories of identity, decolonization, globalization, and medical pluralism within a healthcare setting, combined with an environment of rapid cultural change and commodification, I hope to investigate whether the ancestral medicine on Rapa Nui could be a symbolic gesture of resistance to the historical and residual present restrictions on their self-determination while an international tourism economy destabilizes the meaning of being Rapanui.

What is your favorite running feature on the blog?

My favorite running features on the blog are Guest Blogs and Conference Features. It’s important to connect with current scholars and researchers in the medical humanities and share their work. Guest Blogs such as ‘In-Betweenness’: Liminality, Legality, and migrant Health in Siracusa, Italy with Adam Kersch (available here) highlights the importance of validating the suffering of migrants and how policies can impact health status. Conference Features, such as the latest American Anthropological Association Session Highlights (Part 1 and Part 2) also connect the Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry Journal to a wider academic community and emphasizes interdisciplinary collaboration.

What new features or ideas will you bring to the blog in the coming year?

I am looking forward to encouraging more guest posts and bringing together current events with article highlights and book releases. I am also hoping to introduce a new type of interview feature to the blog. My hope is to present the perspectives of experts from various disciplines to explore connections between current events and articles within CMP, fostering interdisciplinary communication. I am very much looking forward to joining the Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry team!

Message from the AAA 2016 Meeting

Posted by jknopes

via Wikimedia Commons

The Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry editorial team sends our greetings this week from the American Anthropological Association 2016 Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This year’s meeting will be held November 16th-20th, with session listings and other helpful information available here. We hope all of our readers attending the conference have safe travels to– and many productive conversations at– this year’s meeting. As a reminder, we continue to accept guest blog submissions on topics spanning cultural medical anthropology and related disciplines in the social sciences and medical humanities.

Consider submitting an abbreviated version of your AAA conference presentation as a guest blog, or write a commentary on one of the keynote speeches at the event. We look forward to sharing the work and research of our readers with our colleagues on the blog! If you are interested in submitting a guest blog, please contact social media editor Julia Knopes at jcb193@case.edu for details.

As a reminder, there will be no new blog entry posted next Wednesday, November 23rd 2016 in light of the upcoming holiday week.

Best wishes,

The CMP Editorial Team