Extraordinary Conditions
eBook - PDF

Extraordinary Conditions

Culture and Experience in Mental Illness

  1. 368 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Extraordinary Conditions

Culture and Experience in Mental Illness

About this book

With a fine-tuned ethnographic sensibility, Janis H. Jenkins explores the lived experience of psychosis, trauma, and depression among people of diverse cultural orientations, revealing how mental illness engages fundamental human processes of self, desire, gender, identity, attachment, and interpretation. Extraordinary Conditions illuminates the cultural shaping of extreme psychological suffering and the social rendering of the mentally ill as nonhuman or not fully human.

Jenkins contends that mental illness is better characterized in terms of struggle than symptoms and that culture is central to all aspects of mental illness from onset to recovery. Her analysis refashions the boundaries between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the routine and the extreme, and the healthy and the pathological. This book asserts that the study of mental illness is indispensable to the anthropological understanding of culture and experience, and reciprocally that understanding culture and experience is critical to the study of mental illness.

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Yes, you can access Extraordinary Conditions by Janis H. Jenkins in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Cultural & Social Anthropology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Extraordinary Conditions
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. Dedication
  6. Contents
  7. List of Figures and Tables
  8. Prelude and Acknowledgments
  9. Introduction: Culture, Mental Illness, and the Extraordinary
  10. PART ONE. PSYCHOSIS, PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY, AND FAMILIES
  11. PART TWO. VIOLENCE, TRAUMA, AND DEPRESSION
  12. Conclusion: Fruits of the Extraordinary
  13. Notes
  14. Works Cited
  15. Index