Afflictions

This book addresses some of the most pressing issues within the field of psychological anthropology today—mental illness stigma and the possibility of recovery—while modelling an emergent methodology in the cross-cultural study of psychiatric disorders that incorporates visual and otherwise multi-modal materials in research, teaching, and translational psychological anthropology. The volume combines detailed, person-centered, and culturally contextualized case material for each of its six subjects, offering a window into the intersectional aspects of illness and recovery, including: individual expression of illness phenomenology, the labeling of illness and idioms of distress, family support, community interpretations of symptoms and course, traditional medicine and therapy, accommodations and available work, migration, post-colonial identity formation, the effects of a changing political economy, as well as the globalization of mental health care. It also provides a reflexive account of the filmmaking process to illustrate how visual methods of data collection and presentation are able to capture the particularities of these local, individual, and subjective experiences of mental illness, evoke internal and cultural worlds, and present subjects with complex lives that are affected but not delimited by their diagnoses.