Culture Medicine and Psychiatry最新文献

The Covid-19 pandemic has greatly disrupted the education of first-generation college students (first-gens)-those whose parents did not complete a college degree. With campuses closed, activities canceled, and support services curtailed, many first-gens have increasingly relied on their parents for mental, emotional, and logistical support. At the same time, their parents face compounding stresses and challenges stemming from the prolonged effects of the Covid pandemic. We examined the role that relational dynamics between first-gens and their parents played in how they weathered the first 2 years of the Covid pandemic together. We draw upon journals submitted by self-identified first-gens and parents of first-gens to the Pandemic Journaling Project between October 2021 and May 2022 as part of a pilot study of first-gen family experiences of Covid-19, along with a series of interviews conducted with three student-parent dyads. We argue that what we term the micropractices of care-the "little things," like a kind word, small gift, or car ride, that were regularly exchanged between parents and students-played a key role in mental wellness and educational persistence. We find that when there is synchrony between practices offered by one dyad member and their reception by the other, mental wellbeing is preserved. When there is asynchrony, mental health is destabilized. These findings reflect the strategies on which first-gen families have creatively relied to maintain shared mental wellness and student success during a time of crisis. We show how everyday mental wellness is forged in the intersubjective space between two people engaged in achieving shared life goals.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a challenging period for young people in Mexico, particularly those already contending with social and structural inequality. In March 2021, the Colectivo Frontera, a research collective based in Mexico City, Mexico, which works on advancing equity and psychosocial wellbeing among marginalized communities, carried out an 8-week, online project to provide psychosocial support and promote resilience for marginalized young people from different locations in Mexico. The project entailed weekly journaling with the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP), as well as weekly phone sessions with a mental health specialist who provided emotional support (acompañamiento emocional) through practices of active listening. The project culminated in the Escucha (Listen) Podcast for which each youth participant created an episode about their experiences during the pandemic. Many also submitted a photo to accompany their recording; one produced a song. Participant episodes were compiled into a series of five chapters. Each chapter of the podcast centers on a common theme, including reflections on loved ones lost to COVID-19, social fragmentation, gender-based constraints on expressing emotions, and the experiences and perspectives of children. The project provides a compelling example of a low-cost approach to providing support for the mental health and wellbeing of marginalized young people. It also demonstrates the importance of creating projects that help young people make meaningful connections and that leverage their creativity to foster resilience, improve social cohesion, and elevate their perspectives and voices.

On the basis of a research study on cognitive behavioral psychotherapies conducted between 2016 and 2020, this article analyzes exposure as a psychological technique focused on facing and overcoming distressing situations that interfere with everyday life and cause pain. Said psychotherapies have gained more relevance in Argentina in recent years. Their development and institutionalization continued during the first decades of the new millennium. By the late 1990s, there were social and economic transformations that modified people's lives and produced different types of suffering. In addition, that scenario was set with subjectivity models based on the importance of being autonomous and responsible in different spheres of daily life (including healthcare). Accordingly, current social imperatives such as "you can do it" or "give it another try" become values linked to personal realization that are assimilated by these psychotherapies through techniques such as exposure. In that respect, this article aims at analyzing exposure as a psychological technology with evidence-based epistemological presuppositions and problem-solving models based on the subjects' individual commitment. Unlike most social-anthropological studies that connect the notion of exposure to that of risk, from a cognitive behavioral standpoint, self-exposing and overcoming the cause of distress is associated with a successful therapeutic process. This study used a qualitative methodology, and the technique was the analysis drawn from 30 semi-structured interviews with cognitive behavioral psychologists from the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Ethnographic journaling can provide students with powerful opportunities to recognize and value their individual and collective perspectives as both observers and analysts of the world around them, especially in times of crisis. In this Perspectives essay, we share our experiences of using the Pandemic Journaling Project platform as a teaching resource in the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. We consider various aspects of online ethnographic journaling, including creative teaching strategies, journaling's therapeutic potential, and student perspectives on the opportunity to document their own experiences as a forward-looking form of "archival activism." We also discuss how journaling can create robust ethnographic learning opportunities while at the same time providing a valuable space for connection and social support, especially when classroom dynamics are constrained by crisis conditions. Ethnographic journaling can help students appreciate what it means for ethnographers to bring their whole selves into their qualitative work in ways that can challenge mainstream misconceptions and contribute concrete forms of data and ethnographic insight. Overall, the essay explores how ethnographic journaling can create meaningful and creative opportunities for curricular innovation; generate durable forms of ethnographic insight; and also bring student experiences into the classroom in ways that can help them cultivate their voice, build a sense of solidarity, and potentially ease student distress.

This article presents two cases from a collaborative study among Tibetan monastic populations in India on the postdeath meditative state called tukdam (thugs dam). Entered by advanced Tibetan Buddhist practitioners through a variety of different practices, this state provides an ontological frame that is investigated by two distinct intellectual traditions-the Tibetan Buddhist and medical tradition on one hand and the Euroamerican biomedical and scientific tradition on the other-using their respective means of inquiry. Through the investigation, the traditions enact two paradigms of the body at the time of death alongside attendant conceptualizations of what constitutes life itself. This work examines when epistemologies of these two traditions might converge, under what ontological contexts, and through which correlated indicators of evidence. In doing so, this work explores how these two intellectual traditions might answer how the time course and characteristics of physiological changes during the postmortem period might exhibit variation across individuals. Centrally, this piece presents an epistemological inquiry delineating the types of valid evidence that constitute exceptional processes post-clinical death and their potential ontological implications.

Exploring how time emerges as a central problem for lone family caregivers of people with dementia, this article draws attention to care as a way of being in time with others. In addition to active doings that are oriented toward achieving goods that have drawn much attention in recent anthropological discussion on care, care of an intimate other often entails the state of being for the caregiver on which another person's way of being in the present heavily relies. Examining how time is experienced among caregivers who strive to live in the dyadic world of home-based dementia care in South Korea, I consider care as (non-)waiting both in the long term, anticipating the end of the state of caregiving, and in everyday life anticipating small and large fluctuations and interruptions. In the state of caregiving, time is experienced as tense, repetitive, and chronic, which needs to be endured in order for an intimate other to be within the family. Lone caregivers' accounts of the overwhelming weight of care-time both allow and demand us to consider care as a way of being in time with the other, and attend to the experiences of lived time constituted by the difficult intersubjective relationship and its effects on the possibility of having a sense of the near future. This article calls for attention to caregiving as a state in which temporalization becomes challenging, if not impossible.

A key tenet of critical health research is that individual symptoms must be considered in light of the social and political contexts that shape or, in some cases, produce them. Precisely how oppressive social forces give rise to individual symptoms, however, remains challenging to theorize. This article contributes to debates over the interpretation of symptoms through a close reading of the case of Leon, an African American man struggling with an addiction to crack cocaine. Leon presented a complex illness narrative in which his addiction was clearly a product of structural racism, but also the result of dynamics within his family. Drawing on critical reevaluations of Freud's concept of the dreamwork, I call attention to the surface elements of Leon's narrative-what I term the surface of the symptom-and to the formal mechanisms by which latent contents (such as the social, the political, and the personal) are transformed into the manifest form of his symptom. This formal mode of reading offers a productive way of approaching questions of demystification and interpretation, one that holds in tension the register of social causation with the singularities of individuals and their symptoms.

In Mexico, community-based, non-biomedical treatment models for substance use are legally recognized in national drug policy, monitored by state-level Departments of Health, and in some cases publicly funded. Academic research on centers that utilize these forms of treatment have focused primarily on documenting their rapid spread and describing their institutional practices, particularly human rights abuses and lack of established biomedical efficacy. In Tijuana, these community-based therapeutic models are shaped by conceptions of health and illness from the local cultural context of the United States-Mexico border zone in ways that do not cleanly match western, biomedical notions of the illness "addiction." In this article, I examine treatment ethics by exploring the contextually understood need for coerced treatment (i.e., why centers are locked) along with experiences of compulsion in a women's 12 Step center. These discussions highlight the contested therapeutic value of coercion from multiple perspectives. Utilizing engaged listening around local care practices marks a path for global mental health researchers to understand and sit with difference in order to communicate across opposing viewpoints in the service of mental health equity and best care practices.