Culture Medicine and Psychiatry最新文献

Mukbang, a digital practice that originated in South Korea and has since become a global phenomenon, features individuals consuming large quantities of food on camera while engaging with online audiences. While existing studies have approached Mukbang through sociological, nutritional, and media-theoretical lenses, its unconscious appeal remains largely unexamined. This article offers a psychoanalytic reading of Mukbang as a mediated space where unconscious processes of desire, lack, and embodiment are activated. Drawing on five in-depth qualitative interviews with regular viewers, we explore how visual consumption engages psychic dynamics such as scopic jouissance, incorporation, and identification, often marked by ambivalence-between fascination and disgust, control and surrender, satisfaction and frustration. By integrating clinical psychoanalytic theory with cultural analysis, we argue that Mukbang functions as a contemporary dispositif for psychic regulation, allowing viewers to negotiate tensions around food, the body, and symbolic loss within a digital framework. This study contributes to broader interdisciplinary conversations on media, affect, and the cultural shaping of subjectivity.

This article explores how parents in Japan navigate the entangled terrain of caregiving and coercion in the context of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization. Drawing on qualitative interviews with parents whose children were hospitalized without consent, this study foregrounds the complex moral and emotional labor that caregiving entails under conditions of limited institutional support and deep-rooted familial responsibility. The analysis identified two recurring patterns in post-hospitalization relationships: one in which caregiving bonds are sustained but increasingly strained and the other in which hospitalization catalyzes shifts in family dynamics, enabling new forms of distance or reconfiguration. These trajectories were shaped not only by the child's condition but also by the presence or absence of external support, including care quality, and by parents' internal struggles with guilt, obligation, and ambivalence. By situating these narratives within Japan's long-standing reliance on the family as the primary site of psychiatric care, this article contributes to the debate on care, agency, and coercion in psychiatric contexts. It calls for closer attention to how families navigate moral uncertainty and negotiate caregiving roles within a system where family involvement is not only common but often prioritized in the admission process, particularly in cases of hospitalization for medical care and protection.

Sweden Finns are one of the five officially recognized national minority groups in Sweden. Approximately 3.6 percent of the total Swedish population are either born in Finland or have at least one Finnish-born parent; however, since Swedish national minority legislation explicitly applies a self-identification principle rather than objective criteria in determining who belongs to a national minority group, this figure might not correspond to the number of people who actually view themselves as Sweden Finns. On group level, Sweden Finns have been socioeconomically underprivileged in comparison with the Swedish majority population, and tend to be worse off in terms of somatic and mental health. The aim of this study was to explore the many ways in which official minority status, as well as more subtle and systemic processes of minoritization, affect health and healthcare encounters in the Sweden Finnish population in Stockholm, Sweden. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 adults self-identifying as Sweden Finns. The interview data were analyzed using a thematic analysis framework. In all phases of the study, consultation was sought with a reference group representing the Sweden Finnish community. Three main themes were identified: (1) In-between identities, (2) The meaning of language, and (3) Lack of understanding in Swedish society. The participants underscore the importance of Finnish traditions, food, and customs for their personal well-being. Even so, the findings also point to the many ways in which transgenerational trauma experiences and marginalization contribute to the health challenges faced by Sweden Finns today. The study sheds light on the complex layers of historical trauma and ongoing discrimination and their impact on health and healthcare encounters, underscoring the need for cultural sensitivity within Swedish healthcare and Swedish society.

What does it mean to come of age on the spectrum for autistic adolescents and their families? And how might this transitional stage be related to phenomenological questions of dwelling? As part of a broader research project on family life, autism, and coming-of-age in Denmark, this paper explores the case of the autistic adolescent Leo and his family to illuminate how families with autistic adolescents experience and respond to the coming-of-age process. Engaging with perspectives from anthropology of autism, disability, and critical phenomenology including the notion of dwelling, the paper demonstrates how coming-of-age poses pressing demands of (re)imagining, and searching for spaces of belonging and possibilities for becoming in both present and future horizons. These demands are often negotiated and shaped within a world that is dominated by neuronormative and chrononormative expectations, where the dynamics of misfitting are seldom a question of chance. I argue that families like Leo's face not only practical and bureaucratic hurdles related to coming-of-age, but profound existential concerns. They face what I call an intensified dwelling problem of reimagining and searching for ways to feel at home in the world.

Prolonged grief disorder (PGD) is a new diagnostic category included in global diagnostic classification systems for mental disorders. However, PGD can only be diagnosed if the severity and duration exceed socio-cultural norms. Here, we present a new supplementary module to the DSM-5 Cultural Formulation Interview: the Bereavement and Grief Cultural Formulation Interview (BG-CFI). The BG-CFI was developed to help clinicians provide a culturally informed diagnosis and guide treatment planning.We investigated the feasibility, acceptability, and clinical utility of the BG-CFI. Two participant groups (11 refugees, asylum seekers or migrants experiencing bereavement and 3 clinicians) took part in the study and were interviewed using open-ended questions on measures of feasibility, acceptability, and clinical utility. A step-by-step procedure was followed: (1) Clinicians and/or researchers conducted the BG-CFI with participants; (2) Debriefing interviews were conducted separately with clinicians and with bereaved participants.The BG-CFI was found to be a feasible, acceptable, and clinically useful tool for both bereaved participants and clinicians. Where clinicians found the interview difficult to conduct (i.e. lack of conceptual clarity or triggering emotional distress) specific changes were made to the interview format such as prompts for further questioning or recommendations for withholding or adapting questions. The BG-CFI would offer a useful complement for a reliable assessment of PGD in clinical settings working with cultural incongruity.

Studies indicate that the lived experience of being a mental health service user is common among mental health professionals. However, little is known about how such experiences may influence clinical practice. Through interviews and diary notes from fourteen Danish mental health professionals, we explored how these experiences become part of everyday practices. Data were coded and analyzed following an abductive process incorporating the theory of social drama by Victor Turner. We propose a conceptual model of the transitional challenges faced by these professionals within the current social order of Danish mental health services. For some, the lived experience disturbed the social order to such a degree that they questioned their employment; for others, lived experience was either shared verbally or concealed from service users and/or colleagues in ways that did not disturb the social order significantly. The proposed conceptual model points to dichotomies of service users versus professionals and of madness versus normalcy as evident discursive practices within mental health services that do not favor mental health professionals drawing on their lived experience.

This article, based on a collaboration between an ethnopsychiatrist, a psychologist and an anthropologist at the Transcultural Psychiatric Operational Unit (TPOU) in Catania, Sicily, examines how a culturally sensitive approach can support migrants suffering from trauma, depression and other psychological or psychiatric disorders in their recovery and adaptation to the host society. First, we analyse the structure of Italy's migrant reception system and the specific characteristics of the public healthcare framework in Sicily. Next, we trace the history of the TPOU, detailing patient profiles and the facility's philosophy of care since its inception. In the second part, through an exploration of five individuals' therapeutic journeys, we illustrate how access to ethnopsychiatric services has facilitated their recovery and sociocultural integration. Finally, we underscore the disparities in access to treatment opportunities and psychosocial distress prevention programmes in Sicily, highlighting the absence of public facilities capable of providing culturally competent responses to migrants' social suffering.

In mainstream doxa about global mental health, physical and tactile intervention on mental patients, such as corporeal containment, is frequently stigmatized and/or conflated with abusive practices. Nevertheless, in some Afro-Indigenous traditions, such as among the Miskitu of Nicaragua, certain forms of physical containment can be experienced as appropriate care, fostering somatic empathy. This article explores a set of misconceptions and conflations leading to a stigmatization of Miskitu physical containment, unduly associated to emblems of abusive restraint (e.g., straitjackets), and risks of sexual misconduct (2). By acknowledging the legitimacy of these fears, I argue that hauntings of psychiatric abuse must not be superimposed on practices that are superficially similar but substantially different in meaning, outcomes, and ethical implications. Drawing upon an ethnography of tactile care for grisi siknis (spiritual affliction) in Nicaragua, I explore the controversial practice of physically "touching" mental suffering through bodily containment. My aim is twofold: dissipating the false association between psychiatric abuse and any form of tactile mental care, and suggesting a broader reflection on the potentials of tactility for global mental health.

Cross-sector interventions are increasingly suggested in care for trauma-affected refugees, but knowledge about how they influence mental health over time remains sparse. Using a qualitative longitudinal design, we explored patterns of mental health change and aspects contributing to change among refugees participating in a cross-sector intervention addressing post-migration stressors alongside treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Interviews were conducted with participants at four time points during the intervention and the year after. A pattern-oriented analysis helped identify three patterns of mental health change, in which participants experienced either consistent improvements, decline without the support of the intervention, or persistently poor mental health despite changes to post-migration stressors. The patterns differed in how refugees (a) perceived benefiting from the intervention, (b) desired or benefited from social interactions and support, (c) encountered challenging life events, and (d) explained their expectations and agency. The intervention supported improved mental health in two patterns; however, lasting improvement beyond the intervention period was identified in only one pattern. We discuss adaptations and alternative interventions. Findings support a personalized and cross-sectoral approach to mental health treatment to better support the individual needs of refugee patients.

This article interrogates the diagnostic category of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) as a spectral illness, that is transitory, affectively charged, and shaped by regimes of anticipation and surveillance. Drawing on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in Vancouver hospitals, I trace how GDM is enacted not through embodied symptoms but through numerical thresholds, creating a clinical reality that arrives unannounced and often departs before it is ever felt. Despite its apparent disappearance, GDM leaves behind lingering traces: haunting fears of the return of chronic illness, maternal guilt, residual disordered eating tendencies, and the specter of intergenerational risk. Through a conceptual framework that brings together Derrida's notions of the hauntology, spectres, ghosts, and revenants; Fischer's temporal disjunctions of the "no longer" and the "not yet"; and other theories of 'at-riskness' and surveillance in medicine, I argue that GDM initiates a haunting that reconfigures the experience of pregnancy. It summons past traumas, elicits future-oriented anxieties, and embeds the maternal body within a terrain of ongoing clinical and moral oversight. As a diagnosis with a temporal expiration but lasting affective and embodied consequences, GDM demands new analytic attention to how biomedicine produces and manages uncertainty, anticipation, spectrality, and haunting.