Extraordinary Conditions ─ Culture and Experience in Mental Illness

With a fine-tuned ethnographic sensibility, Janis H. Jenkins explores the lived experience of psychosis, trauma, and depression among people of diverse cultural orientations, thus revealing how mental illness engages fundamental human processes of self, desire, gender, identity, attachment, and meaning.

This study illuminates the shaping of human reality and subjectivity under conditions of extreme psychological suffering as well as the psychopolitical processes of alterity, precarity, and repression in the social rendering of the mentally ill as nonhuman or not fully human. Extraordinary Conditions addresses the critical need to engage empathically with people who experience conditions culturally defined as mental illness.

Jenkins affirms 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. Analysis at this edge of experience refashions the boundaries between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the routine and the extreme, and the healthy and the pathological. This book argues 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. Whereas anthropology neglects the extraordinary, psychiatry neglects cultureattitudes problematical in both disciplines.

Janis H. Jenkins is a psychological/medical anthropologist at the University of California, San Diego, and a leading scholar internationally within the field of culture and mental health.