Pathologies of the West

Pathologies of the West PDF Author: Roland Littlewood
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801487439
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Psychiatry conventionally regards spirit possession and dramatic healing rituals in non-European societies as forms of abnormality if not mental illness. Roland Littlewood, a psychiatrist and social anthropologist, argues that it is necessary to take into account both social process and personal cultural meaning when explaining psychiatric illness and "deviant" behavior. Littlewood brings anthropological and psychiatric literature to bear on case studies of self-poisoning, agoraphobia, hysteria, chronic fatigue syndrome, post-traumatic stress, male sexual violence, and eating disorders. He contends that Western psychiatric illnesses are themselves "possession states"--patterns by which individual agency is displaced through an idiom of alien intrusion whether of a spirit or a disease.Pathologies of the West is simultaneously an original approach to psychiatric illness in its international perspective and an introduction to recent developments in the social anthropology of medicine. It examines critically the relevance of phenomenological, structural, and ethological approaches to understanding extreme personal experience. Littlewood argues that anthropology must not simply provide a cultural alternative to sociological critiques of medicine--psychiatry itself should take into account the ways in which cultural values are acted out by individuals.

Pathologies of the West

Pathologies of the West PDF Author: Roland Littlewood
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801487439
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Psychiatry conventionally regards spirit possession and dramatic healing rituals in non-European societies as forms of abnormality if not mental illness. Roland Littlewood, a psychiatrist and social anthropologist, argues that it is necessary to take into account both social process and personal cultural meaning when explaining psychiatric illness and "deviant" behavior. Littlewood brings anthropological and psychiatric literature to bear on case studies of self-poisoning, agoraphobia, hysteria, chronic fatigue syndrome, post-traumatic stress, male sexual violence, and eating disorders. He contends that Western psychiatric illnesses are themselves "possession states"--patterns by which individual agency is displaced through an idiom of alien intrusion whether of a spirit or a disease.Pathologies of the West is simultaneously an original approach to psychiatric illness in its international perspective and an introduction to recent developments in the social anthropology of medicine. It examines critically the relevance of phenomenological, structural, and ethological approaches to understanding extreme personal experience. Littlewood argues that anthropology must not simply provide a cultural alternative to sociological critiques of medicine--psychiatry itself should take into account the ways in which cultural values are acted out by individuals.

Pathologies of Power

Pathologies of Power PDF Author: Paul Farmer
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520243269
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
"Pathologies of Power" uses harrowing stories of life and death to argue thatthe promotion of social and economic rights of the poor is the most importanthuman rights struggle of our times.

Crazy Like Us

Crazy Like Us PDF Author: Ethan Watters
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416587195
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
“A blistering and truly original work of reporting and analysis, uncovering America’s role in homogenizing how the world defines wellness and healing” (Po Bronson). In Crazy Like Us, Ethan Watters reveals that the most devastating consequence of the spread of American culture has not been our golden arches or our bomb craters but our bulldozing of the human psyche itself: We are in the process of homogenizing the way the world goes mad. It is well known that American culture is a dominant force at home and abroad; our exportation of everything from movies to junk food is a well-documented phenomenon. But is it possible America's most troubling impact on the globalizing world has yet to be accounted for? American-style depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anorexia have begun to spread around the world like contagions, and the virus is us. Traveling from Hong Kong to Sri Lanka to Zanzibar to Japan, acclaimed journalist Ethan Watters witnesses firsthand how Western healers often steamroll indigenous expressions of mental health and madness and replace them with our own. In teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we have been homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

Common Mental Health Disorders

Common Mental Health Disorders PDF Author: National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health (Great Britain)
Publisher: RCPsych Publications
ISBN: 9781908020314
Category : Health services accessibility
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Bringing together treatment and referral advice from existing guidelines, this text aims to improve access to services and recognition of common mental health disorders in adults and provide advice on the principles that need to be adopted to develop appropriate referral and local care pathways.

Dance Pathologies

Dance Pathologies PDF Author: Felicia M. McCarren
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804735247
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
A history of dance’s pathologization may startle readers who find in dance performance grace, discipline, geometry, poetry, and the body’s transcendence of itself. Exploring dance’s historical links to the medical and scientific connotations of a “pathology,” this book asks what has subtended the idealization of dance in the West. It investigates the nineteenth-century response, in the intersections of dance, literature, and medicine, to the complex and long-standing connections between illness, madness, poetry, and performance. In the nineteenth century, medicine becomes a major cultural index to measure the body’s meanings. As a particularly performative form of madness, nineteenth-century hysteria preserved the traditional connection to dance in medical descriptions of “choreas.” In its withholding of speech and its use of body code, dance, like hysteria, functions as a form of symptomatic expression. Yet by working like a symptom, dance performance can also be read as a commentary on symptomatology and as a condition of possibility for such alternative approaches to mental illness as psychoanalysis. By redeeming as art what is “lost” in hysteria, dance expresses non-hysterically what only hysteria had been able to express: the somatic translation of idea, the physicalization of meaning. Medicine’s discovery of “idea” manifesting itself in the body in mental illness strikingly parallels a literary fascination with the ability of nineteenth-century dance to manifest “idea,” suggesting that the evolution of medical thinking about mind-body relations as they malfunction in madness, as well as changes in the cultural reception of danced representations of these relations, might be paradigmatic shifts caused by the same cultural factors: concern about the body as a site of meaning and about vision as a theater of knowledge.

Rickettsial Diseases

Rickettsial Diseases PDF Author: Didier Raoult
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 142001997X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
The only available reference to comprehensively discuss the common and unusual types of rickettsiosis in over twenty years, this book will offer the reader a full review on the bacteriology, transmission, and pathophysiology of these conditions. Written from experts in the field from Europe, USA, Africa, and Asia, specialists analyze specific patho

The Colonial Disease

The Colonial Disease PDF Author: Maryinez Lyons
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521524520
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
A case-study in the history of sleeping sickness, relating it to the western 'civilising mission'.

Difference and Disease

Difference and Disease PDF Author: Suman Seth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108304850
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Before the nineteenth century, travellers who left Britain for the Americas, West Africa, India and elsewhere encountered a medical conundrum: why did they fall ill when they arrived, and why - if they recovered - did they never become so ill again? The widely accepted answer was that the newcomers needed to become 'seasoned to the climate'. Suman Seth explores forms of eighteenth-century medical knowledge, including conceptions of seasoning, showing how geographical location was essential to this knowledge and helped to define relationships between Britain and her far-flung colonies. In this period, debates raged between medical practitioners over whether diseases changed in different climes. Different diseases were deemed characteristic of different races and genders, and medical practitioners were thus deeply involved in contestations over race and the legitimacy of the abolitionist cause. In this innovative and engaging history, Seth offers dramatically new ways to understand the mutual shaping of medicine, race, and empire.

The Decline of the West

The Decline of the West PDF Author: Oswald Spengler
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195066340
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 500

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Book Description
Spengler's work describes how we have entered into a centuries-long "world-historical" phase comparable to late antiquity, and his controversial ideas spark debate over the meaning of historiography.

Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness PDF Author: Roy Richard Grinker
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393531651
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
A compassionate and captivating examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness throughout history and the fight to end the stigma. For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody’s Normal, anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma—from the eighteenth century, through America’s major wars, and into today’s high-tech economy. Nobody’s Normal argues that stigma is a social process that can be explained through cultural history, a process that began the moment we defined mental illness, that we learn from within our communities, and that we ultimately have the power to change. Though the legacies of shame and secrecy are still with us today, Grinker writes that we are at the cusp of ending the marginalization of the mentally ill. In the twenty-first century, mental illnesses are fast becoming a more accepted and visible part of human diversity. Grinker infuses the book with the personal history of his family’s four generations of involvement in psychiatry, including his grandfather’s analysis with Sigmund Freud, his own daughter’s experience with autism, and culminating in his research on neurodiversity. Drawing on cutting-edge science, historical archives, and cross-cultural research in Africa and Asia, Grinker takes readers on an international journey to discover the origins of, and variances in, our cultural response to neurodiversity. Urgent, eye-opening, and ultimately hopeful, Nobody’s Normal explains how we are transforming mental illness and offers a path to end the shadow of stigma.