Issue Highlight: Vol 39 Issue 3, Suicide in Rural Kenya

Posted by jknopes

When a new issue of Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry is released, we feature a series of blog posts that highlight these latest publications in our journal. The current September issue includes articles that address psychiatric conditions and the experiences of people with mental illness across cultures. Readers may access the full issue at Springer here: http://link.springer.com/journal/11013/39/3/page/1. In this issue highlight, we will discuss an article on ethnographic analyses of suicide and distress amongst three communities in northern Kenya.

Suicide in Three East African Pastoralist Communities and the Role of Researcher Outsiders for Positive Transformation: A Case Study

Bilinda Straight, Ivy Pike, Charles Hilton, and Matthias Oesterle – Pages 557-578

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11013-014-9417-4

The authors of this article strive to establish a nuanced and ethnographically rich understanding of suicide and mental distress in an under-studied population of three distinct, yet interacting, pastoral communities in northern central Kenya. These three groups– the Pokot, Samburu, and Turkana– are engaged in intercommunity conflicts over territory and land use agreements, despite the communities’ shared and entangled oral histories. Such tensions are only exacerbated by mutual fear of raids by other groups, dearths in food available for forage, and the theft of livestock from individuals who sell the animals to finance political campaigns. Poverty is likewise aggravated by these patterns of loss and violence.

This turbulent social environment creates widespread mental distress amongst the three communities, yet individuals from each group stressed to the research team that they felt obligated to persevere despite these pressures, making admitting psychological suffering (and especially confessing thoughts about suicide) deeply taboo. Therefore, any mental health intervention would have to be responsive to the extent to which Pokot, Samburu, and Turkana culture disallow individuals from discussing or even thinking about suicide: an act which could create even more social strain on the family of the person who committed it. The researchers confirmed this inability to discuss suicide by the high rates of non-response on a survey question which asked participants whether or not they had experienced suicidal thoughts.

Suicide thus proves to be a unique case for anthropological analysis because it is both driven by the social conditions of those who take their own lives, as well as disruptive to the communities in which these people lived. Its treatment by global health workers must in turn be sensitive to cultural beliefs that forbid conversation about suicide, especially in communities where the death of an individual may contribute to already extraordinary social distress.

Issue Highlight: Vol 39 Issue 3, Maya Mental Disorders in Belize

Posted by jknopes

With each new issue of Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry, we feature a series of blog posts that highlight the latest publications in our journal. This September’s issue includes articles that address psychiatric conditions and the experiences of people with mental illness across numerous cultures. Readers may access the full issue at Springer here: http://link.springer.com/journal/11013/39/3/page/1. In today’s issue highlight, we will examine a study on indigenous nosologies of mental illness amongst the Maya of Belize.

Narrative Structures of Maya Mental Disorders

Andrew R. Hatala, James B. Waldram, and Tomas Caal – Pages 449-486

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11013-015-9436-9

To understand the compatibility of divergent medical traditions, it is first essential to describe how medical systems classify and interpret disorders in particular ways. With this aim in mind, the authors of this ethnographic study sought to develop an picture of indigenous mental illness nosology amongst the Q’eqchi’ Maya of southern Belize. They also asked how this knowledge may alternatively coexist, or compete, with biomedical concepts of suffering.

In order to learn about this indigenous medical epistemology, the authors worked with the Maya Healers’ Association, a professional, self-regulated group of twelve healers who maintain a garden of medicinal plants for research and who strive to reinvigorate traditional medical practice in Belize. Across ninety-four interviews with healers, the authors uncovered four illness categories that the participants used to describe the roots of mental illnesses: “thinking too much,” fright, the day of birth, and spirit “attacks.”

These descriptions are sometimes cross-compatible with DSM-V nosologies, as the researchers discovered that “thinking too much” was also listed as a symptom in biomedical models of mental illness. However, unlike the DSM-V, Maya healers tended to characterize overthinking as a “genre” of illness experience rather than as a discrete symptom. Maya healers also characterize mental illnesses as existing within the heart, the mind, and the spirit: thereby expanding the implications of mental illness beyond brain physiology, the proximate explanation employed by biomedical psychiatry.

The authors conclude that it is essential to understand the similarities in the two nosologies to facilitate collaboration between indigenous and biomedical healers, but add that both groups must also be aware of the differences in classificatory schemes that they use to interpret mental illness. In this way, people with mental disorders in Belize may best receive care that accounts for all of the ways they might seek care and understand their illness across the boundaries of medical systems.

Book Release: Carlo Caduff’s “The Pandemic Perhaps”

Posted by jknopes

Image via UC Press site

Released this August 2015 from University of California Press is Carlo Caduff’s The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger. In the text, Caduff focuses on alerts in 2005 posted by American experts about a deadly, approaching influenza outbreak. These urgent messages warned that the outbreak would have crippling effects on the economy and potentially end the lives of millions of people. Even though this potentially-catastrophic outbreak ultimately never occurred, preparedness efforts for the slated pandemic carried on.

The text is the product of anthropological fieldwork carried out amongst public health agents, scientists, and other key players in New York City surrounding the influenza scare. Caduff demonstrates how these figures framed the potential outbreak, and how they sought to capture the public’s attention regarding the disease. The book grapples with questions about information, perceived danger, and the meaning of safety in the face of large-scale epidemics. Likewise, Caduff examines how institutions and individuals come to cope with the uncertainty of new outbreaks.

The book will be of interest to cultural medical anthropologists as well as epidemiologists and scholars in public health. Caduff’s work will no doubt shed a timely new light on the way that the threat of epidemics shapes health policy and public perceptions of disease and security.

Caduff is Lecturer in the Department of Social Science, Health, and Medicine at King’s College London. His research addresses the anthropology of science, technology, and medicine, as well as issues surrounding knowledge, expertise, safety, and disease.

For more information on the book, visit the publisher’s website here: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520284098