Our Most Troubling Madness ─ Case Studies in Schizophrenia Across Cultures

Schizophrenia has long puzzled researchers in the fields of psychiatric medicine and anthropology. Why is it that the rates of developing schizophrenia—long the poster child for the biomedical model of psychiatric illness—are low in some countries and not others? And why do migrants to Western countries find they are at higher risk for this disease when they arrive? Tanya Luhrmann argues it is because the root causes for schizophrenia are not only biological, but also sociocultural.
 
This book gives an intimate, personal account of the different experiences living with serious psychotic disorder in the U.S., India, Africa, and South East Asia. It introduces the notion that social defeat—or the physical or symbolic defeat of one person by another—is a core mechanism at work in the increased risk for psychotic illness. Furthermore, “care as usual” as it occurs in the U.S. actually increases the likelihood of social defeat, whereas “care as usual” in a country like India diminishes it.

Tanya Luhrmann is Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. She is the author of Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft, Of Two Minds, and When God Talks Back. Jocelyn Marrow is a graduate student of Anthropology at Stanford University.