University of Chicago doctoral student Brenden Raymond-Yakoubian, with guidance from Dr. Jean Comaroff, will investigate how knowledge concerns, evinced in discourse, figure into the experience and understanding of psychiatric disorders. The discourse of knowledge concerns includes discussions of what constitutes accurate information, what can and cannot be known, what is considered to be evidence, and how evidence may be deployed in psychiatric contexts. The focus of the research will be obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in the American treatment context. OCD is estimated to have a prevalence rate of 1 to 3 percent in the US, which gives this research the potential for broad social value.
The researcher will undertake ethnographic fieldwork at two clinical programs in the United States which treat OCD. The researcher will also undertake fieldwork with OCD support groups, with OCD-related advocates, and at conferences related to OCD and its treatment. Additional research will be conducted through analysis of OCD medical, research and self-help literature as well as popular media. Data collection will focus on determining what the discourses in this context are, how they are interrelated, what role knowledge plays in these discourses, and how knowledge concerns circulate.
Previous social science study of OCD has focused on the disorder as a form of personal ritual or cultural modeling. This new project will contribute to better understanding of OCD, and potentially other psychiatric disorders, by investigating how knowledge concerns affect the cultural experiences and understandings of OCD. This will contribute to social science theory of the relation between mental illness and culture, as well as to improving care for those with OCD. Additionally, this research will support the education of a social scientist.
This project is an anthropological study of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in the American treatment context. Much of the previous anthropological work on OCD had focused on considerations of ritual and a concern for modeling. This research built off of this prior work to expand our anthropological understanding of OCD by shifting focus toward how knowledge concerns figure into the experiences and understandings of OCD in the American treatment context. Additionally, in its topical focus, its attention to discourse, and its methodology, this project built off of other work on OCD that utilized ethnographic techniques and which were concerned with the sociocultural contextualization of mental disorders, as well as other work in the social and historical studies of psychology, the social studies of knowledge and science, and linguistic anthropology. This research has indicated that a variety of knowledge concerns - such as forms and techniques of evidence, standards of truth, uses of and anxieties about uncertainty, and competing views of knowledge - play an important part in the way OCD is currently experienced, understood, conceptualized, and treated in this context. To collect data for this project, the Co-PI undertook ethnographic observations of treatment, support group, and conference settings, conducted ethnographic interviews with a variety of research subjects involved with OCD (e.g. OCD sufferers, treatment providers, researchers, and advocates), and undertook research on a variety of relevant texts. This project contributed to the training of a doctoral student in anthropology. It is anticipated that the products resulting from this research will have value in explaining the ways OCD is currently experienced, understood, and conceptualized in the US. It is also anticipated that these results will be of value in bringing a different analytical perspective on OCD and its treatment to OCD sufferers, researchers, and advocates that may be of use (for example, in providing care).
