Doctoral student, Whitney L. Duncan, with the guidance of her advisor Dr. Janis H. Jenkins, will undertake research on a specific aspect of globalization: the spread of Euroamerican psychiatric and psychological practices and ideologies to new sites around the world, where local understandings of emotion and illness are being impacted in multiple ways. The study will investigate if and how globalizing mental health ideologies are changing local medical systems, conceptions about what it means to be emotionally stable, what therapeutic modalities are appropriate for those who are not stable, and the subjective experience of emotional distress.
The research will be carried out in the local context of Oaxaca, Mexico. Over the past two decades, Oaxaca has seen dramatic increases in diagnosed mental illnesses, a spike in the availability of psychiatric and psychological services, and an unprecedented demand for mental healthcare. This multi-sited ethnographic study investigates how and why the growth in mental healthcare has occurred and what impact it is having on Oaxacans' conceptions and experiences of emotional distress. Ethnographic research will be carried out in the capital city of Oaxaca de Juárez as well as in the indigenous Mixteca region, where emigration is ubiquitous. The investigator will conduct long-term participant observation, structured, semi-structured, and life history interviews, and sociolinguistic analysis of casual interactions.
The research is important because it will provide an ethnographic account of the cultural context of emotion, illness, and healing in a particular locale, and will advance theoretical understanding of how those aspects of social life and subjectivity change under competing local and global discourses. Conducting the proposed study in Oaxaca at this moment of cultural change and social flux will illuminate the effects globalizing mental health practices and discourses are having at the local level. The results of the research also will help practitioners working with Mexican migrant communities in the United States. Funding the research supports the education of a graduate student.
Over the past two decades, the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca has seen dramatic increases in diagnosed mental illness, a spike in the availability of psychiatric and psychological services, and unprecedented demand for mental healthcare. Oaxaca is known for its thriving, centuries-old systems of indigenous healing; as such, the recent boom in biomedical and psychological mental health practice represents a historical departure and, the dissertation argues, reveals broader cultural changes underway. Through a multi-sited ethnographic study in Oaxaca’s capital city and the indigenous Mixteca region, this dissertation examines how and why the changes in Oaxaca’s culture of mental health have occurred and how they are impacting Oaxacans’ conceptions and experiences of illness and healing. While I argue that psychological and biomedical understandings of mental health are taking hold in Oaxaca, the dissertation illuminates how predominant orientations toward ethnicity, gender, and social relations re-shape psychiatric categories and psychological concepts as they are locally integrated .Though expansion of Euroamerican mental health practice can signify increasingly homogenous ideologies and forms of care throughout the world, I emphasize that their integration into local systems can also be generative of novel social practices and self-understandings. On the other hand, I investigate how mental health services and institutions further entrench existing inequalities by stigmatizing indigenous medical practices and transferring responsibility for social suffering—particularly in relation to poverty, immigration, gender, and violence—to suffering individuals. This ethnography of social and cultural change illuminates precisely what effects globalizing mental health practices and ideologies are having in Oaxaca, thus (1) advancing anthropological theory on the reciprocal relationships between global trends, cultural discourse, professional and institutional practice, and individual experience; (2) providing qualitative data on health beliefs, disparities, and access to treatment in marginalized indigenous communities; (3) creating knowledge beneficial to medicine and global public health; and (4) contributing to the growing and much needed convergence between the medical and social sciences. Overall, the study contributes to anthropological and cross-disciplinary scholarship on the interaction between culture and mental health, the social determinants of health, and the transformative impacts of globalization for communities and individuals.
