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Oct 20, 2008, 09:32 AM
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Member Since: Feb 2007
Location: The place where X marks the spot.
Posts: 1,848
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Some considerations from the field of anthropology...
Quote:
... what we know about culture and schizophrenia at the outset of the twenty-first century is the following: Culture is critical in nearly every aspect of schizophrenic illness expereince: the identification, definition and meaning of the illness during the prodromal, acute and residual phases; the timing and type of onset; symptom formation in terms of content, form and constellation; clinical diagnosis; gender and ethnic differences; the personal experience of schizophrenia illness; social response, support and stigma; and perhaps, most important, the course and outcome of disorders with respect to symtomatology, work and social functioning. ...
Introduction to the Three Parts: Themes and Cross-Currents
This volume is intended to bring the puzzle of schizophrenia under scrutiny from the standpoint of the social sciences; that is, those disciplines that take as their central concern the problem of human life as such. And while the chapters represent perspective that combine social and medical sciences broadly, the overarching conceptual framework for the volume hinges largely on culture theory from contemporary anthropology. The volume is organized in three parts that elaborate cultural analyses of the problem, each of which constitutes a piece of the puzzle of the psychoses.
In the first part, authors outline state-of-the-art understandings of culture, self and experience that are critical to a cross-culturally comparative and global understanding. Each of the four chapters in the second part sets out a methodological strategy, in turn, developing the ethnographic, sociolinguistic, clinical and historical dimensions of schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders. The third part plumbs the depth of subjectivity and emotion, withou an understanding of which the daily lived experience of schizophrenia must remain unnecessarily imcomprehensible. We will summarize each of the parts in turn, and conclude our introduction by reflecting on the clinical impressions of the work collected here.
The first part deals with a number of critical issues that confront all studies of human experience, and culture and schizophrenia in particular. One is the relationship between the ordinary and the extraordinary; another is the nexus between subjectivity and culture; and a third is the tension between general and specific concepts of culture. These problematics, elaborated through studies of schizophrenia, define the broader terms for analysis that are developed more fully in the ensuing parts.
Chapter 1 (Jenkins) argues that schizophrenia itself offers a paradigm case for understandings of culturally fundamental and ordinary processes and capacities of the self, the emotions and social engagement. She also shows how the experiences of people with schizophrenia can be quintessentially extraordinary just as they can be exquisitely ordinary. As a consequence, people who suffer from the disorder have a unique capacity to teach us about human processes that are fundamental to living in a world shared with others.
A single-minded focus on the similarities between those who have schizophrenia and those who do not carries the risk of negating what is so extraordinary about this illness, underestimating the intensity of suffering it entails, and overlooking the resilience of those who grapple with it. But if the focus is restricted to understanding differences between abnormal and normal, the risk is one of devaluing the person with schizophrenia. Difference may lean to diminution and decomposition of the person into an object. Jenkins embraces the extraordinary and the ordinary in schizophrenia, the abnormal and the normal, and gives no quarter to those who would play down the insights that people with the illness offer, nor to those who would characterize them as flawed and emotionally empty humans.
Chapter 5 (Lucas), in exploring some of the cultural processes at work around this ordinary/extraordinary interface, carries this analyses further. Drawing on ethnographic work in Australia among people with schizophrenia and juxtaposing these data with classical formulations of the disorder within the psychiatric literatre, he locates schizophrenia both outside and inside the bounds of culture. Psychiatric discourse identifies the source of this illness in the body and in nature, thereby placing it beyond culture. On the other hand, schizophrenia itself is a cultural category, replete with cultural tropes.
It is sometimes construed as a primitive state in which archaic sources of violent energy erupt through surface laters of control; or a state of confusion and alienation that mirrors the complex modern society in which we live; or a form of creative power akin to artistic genius. Such images are not only invoked by psychiatrists, but also by people so diagnosed when representing schizophrenia to themselves...
Source: Schizophrenia, Culture and Subjectivity: The Edge of Experience [PDF File]
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The above is just a brief excerpt of a 20 page brief. Those who wish to know more can click on the link above or, order the book linked below.
See also: Schizophrenia, Culture and Subjectivity: The Edge of Experience [Book]. This book is substantially less than the last one I linked. It's $30 - $35 with used versions beginning at $20.
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