NS-0217: Culture and Mental Health: Decolonizing the Psyche

Due Oct. 13

*Check for updates often!

We have opted NOT to have group presentations this semester, but feel free to use this as a guide for preparing for class!

Readings

• ·       Mukoma Wa Ngugi: What Decolonizing the Mind Means Today. 2018. Literary Hub. Available online: https://lithub.com/mukoma-wa-ngugi-what-decolonizing-the-mind-means-today/

o   Don’t get hung up on the literary criticism details, get the gist

• ·       “Introduction – Invisible Pioneers: ‘Culture and Personality’ Reconsidered.” In Psychological Anthropology: A Reader on Self in Culture, edited by Robert Levine.

o   --skim this for broad contours of the culture and personality school

• ·       “Postcolonial Disorders: Reflections on Subjectivity in the Contemporary World,” by Byron Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Sandra Teresa Hyde, and Sarah Pinto. In Postcolonial Disorders, UC Press, 2008.

o   --read pages 2 – 11 on subjectivity, postcolonial, and disorders

• ·       Wu HY. “World citizenship and the emergence of the social psychiatry project of the World Health Organization, 1948-c.1965.” Hist Psychiatry. 2015 Jun;26(2):166-81. doi: 10.1177/0957154X14554375. PMID: 26022467.

o   --skim this for context.

Readings

• ·       Akosua Adomako Ampofo, 2019. Me san aba: The Africa We Want and an African-centered Approach to Knowledge Production. In Global Sociology and the Struggles for a Better World. Edited by Schulz. Sage.

• ·       Arthur Kleinman. “What is a Psychiatric Diagnosis?” In Rethinking Psychiatry, New York Free Press, 1988.

Syllabus teaching moment: There are many important works that can help you understand the hierarchies of value latent in academia and other currents of knowledge production and circulation. Here are a couple scholarly sources that shed light on the imperialism, antiblackness, and colonialism inherent in the theories and research paradigms by which so many of us learn and act, and that also bring alternative possibilities into view:

-       Linda Tuhiwai Smith 1999 (2^nd edition 2012). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books.

-       Raewyn Connell, 2008. Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Allen & Unwin.

-       Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, 2013. The Undercommons. See pages 25 – 43?

Another syllabus teaching moment: There are so many ways to read the history of psychological anthropology. The following are recommended, at least to know they exist, or to have other places to go as you deepen you quest.

-       Janis Jenkins. Extraordinary Conditions: Culture and Experience in Mental Health. UC Press 2015.

See Introduction… available as an ebook.

-       Tanya Luhrmann. Of Two Minds: The Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry. Knopf, 2000.

Again, see intro for a take on the field.

-       Arthur Kleinman and Byron Good, 1985. “Introduction to Culture and Depression.” From Culture and Depression: Studies in the Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder, edited by Kleinman and Good, UC Press.

Readings

• ·       Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega. Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject. Fordham University Press, 2017.

o   --Read Intro pages 1-6 and 9-11

o   --Read or at least skim Chapter 3, “Cerebralizing Distress”

o   --Available as an e-book, check out as much as you want!

• -       Aurora Levins Morales, 2019. Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals. Duke.

o   --Read “Ecology is Everything”

IF we had another week, we might read:

Beth Semel. “The Body Audible: From Vocal Biomarkers to a Phrenology of the Throat.” Somatosphere 2020: http://somatosphere.net/2020/the-body-audible.html/

Joseph Calabrese, 2008. “Clinical Paradigm Clashes: Ethnocentric and Political Barriers to Native American Efforts at Self-Healing.” Ethos 36(3): 334-353.

Readings

• ·       Podcast. “Crazy Like Us: Are Americans Exporting Their Dysfunctions to the Rest of the World?”

https://hdavidbaer.com/2021/05/20/crazy-like-us-are-americans-exporting-their-dysfunctions-to-the-rest-of-the-world/

o   (is listening intriguing? infuriating? in a productive way?)

o   Recommended, or for background: Ethan Watters. Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche. Free Press 2010.

o   I had been thinking of assigning ch. 4 “The Mega-Marketing of Depression in Japan” and then went with the podcast. (That chapter a good link to pharma conversation too) Discuss?

o   As you listen, please recall your reading from the first class, parts of the Intro to “Postcolonial Disorders: Reflections on Subjectivity in the Contemporary World.”

“Readings”

·       Adam Curtis documentary. Century of the Self. Focus on parts 1 – 3:

·       adrienne maree brown. “spells and practices for emergent strategy.” From Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. AK Press 2017.

Syllabus teaching moment: There is work that takes on the domineering figures at the roots of psychiatry and psychology – historical accounts that seek to place those figures’ ideas in social context, including exploring the antiblackness and antisemitism that finds its way into foundational work. You might, for instance, consult:

-       -Byron Good, 2010. “Emil Kraeplin on Pathologies of the Will.” In Toward and Anthropology of the Will, edited by Murphy and Throop.

-       -J. Lorand Matory, 2018. “The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make.” Duke U Press.

There are no heroes in our account, not in a “pure” sense. (See even Aurora Levins Morales’ self-disclosure in her stories.) Do you yearn for such?

Readings

·       Lorna Rhodes. 2004. Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison. UC Press.

o   --read preface and introduction

o   --this is an ebook. Take a look through it and read another chapter too.

·       Paul Brodwin and Livia Velpry. 2014. “The Practice of Constraint in Psychiatry: Emergent Forms of Care and Control.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 38 (4): 524–26. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-014-9402-y.

Readings

·       Paul Linde. 2010. Danger to Self: On the Front Line with an ER Psychiatrist. UC Press.

o   --Read Preface (Nowhere to Hid) and Chapter 1 (The ER Doc: Who’s Calling the Shots?)

Recommended

·       Katie Kilroy-Marac, “The Legacy of French Colonial Psychiatry”: https://africasacountry.com/2021/06/the-legacy-of-french-colonial-psychiatry?fbclid=IwAR2uChVtQLe_BYyM94NVCrDzgLTzkbQPZap-m7OHTmp1R8WlySOqFPgVxGI

Readings

·       Prentis Hemphill
Street Somatics: Tips for Regulating Nervous Systems in Uprisings: https://www.instagram.com/p/CA3RW0uA8CW/?fbclid=IwAR1RLTI550APEDcqeSfDscrgF5o5qt4UTkXuOG_EMktTGjl-ZEtZVfE4av8

·       Joseph Dumit. 2002. “Is It Me or My Brain? Depression and Neuroscientific Facts.” Journal of Medical Humanities, 13.

Recommended

·       Erica James, “Haunting Ghosts: Madness, Gender, and Ensekirite in Haiti in the Democratic Era.” In Postcolonial Disorders.

(I had this as an option for this class, but I think Dumit will serve us better at this point. Will leave James here for those interested; it's a great piece, I'll try to give you an overview in class)

Readings

·       Julia Cassaniti. 2019. “Keeping It Together: Idioms of Resilience and Distress in Thai Buddhist Mindlessness.” Transcultural Psychiatry 56 (4): 697–719. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363461519847303.

Readings

·       Martin, Emily. 2007. “Pharmaceutical Personality.” In Bipolar Expedition: Mania and Depression in American Culture. Pp. 150-173. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

·       “Graphic Medicine: how autobiographical comic artists are changing our understanding of illness.” August 10, 2021, the conversation:

o   https://theconversation.com/graphic-medicine-how-autobiographical-comics-artists-are-changing-our-understanding-of-illness-164789?fbclid=IwAR0c-QhDCNBdRHWdhvp_VUFSD_JZFvuZ4DP2jsOnYbUJZLcYs-cCrGOr6PQ

·      “Interoception: the hidden sense that shapes wellbeing.” August 15, 2021, The Guardian:

o   https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/15/the-hidden-sense-shaping-your-wellbeing-interoception?fbclid=IwAR2t1gkTlS5MqXNRPGltjo_2Sm-4FQM4L0KT92U7kTe4grKFs3GSMT4Tttg

Recommended

·       Janis Jenkins. “Cultural Chemistry in the Clozapine Clinic.” Chapter 1 from Extraordinary Conditions: Culture and Experience in Mental Illness. UC Pres 2015. (ebook)

o   This is really good, but not as fun a read as Martin. Important perspective though, of interest?

·       New Yorker piece on being on drugs and weaning off?

o   https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-challenge-of-going-off-psychiatric-drugs

PS Do you know this?

·       Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, 2012. “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1(1): 1- 40.

Readings

·       Darian Leader and Judy Groves, 2000. Introducing Lacan. Graphic introduction.

o   --Pay particular attention to 18-29, 33, 41, 43, 51, 143, 165  (read what you need to to help these elements land). I’m assigning this because I feel we need some background on what Lacanian theory is in order to get the most out of Fanon this week, as well as other work we will continue to read inspired therefrom… But this is not a class on Lacan…  So don’t go crazy)

·       Frantz Fanon, 2008 (1952). Black Skin, White Masks. Grove Press

o   --Foreword by Kwame Anthony Appiah

o   –Introduction

o   –Chapter One: The Black Man and Language

Recommended:

·       For background on Fanon, why we read him, why others read him:

o   https://mronline.org/2017/08/23/a-revolutionary-lifeline-teaching-fanon-in-a-postcolonial-world/

o   &

o   https://www.abc.net.au/religion/why-reading-frantz-fanon-matters/12416602

Readings

·       Jonathan Rosa’s Master Class, “Unsettling Race and Language: Toward a Raciolinguistic Perspective:

·       Phia S. Salter and Glenn Adams. “Provisional Strategies for Decolonizing Consciousness.” From Anti-Racism Inc: Why the Way WE Talk about Racial Justice Matters, edited by Felice Blkae, Paula Ionide, and Alison Reed. punctum books. Pp 299 – 323.

Syllabus overload. I know this week is already too much. But…

You might want to take a look, just for fun, at Gilles Deleuze’s “Preface to the Italian Edition of A Thousand Plateaus”, because it has a nice way of saying how they wanted to get rid of the Oedipus complex and how they failed…

And if we had more time, another week on this tip, we’d read from Frank B. Wildernson III, 2020, Afropessimism.

Including: Ch. 1 “For Halloween I Washed My Face” & “Epilogue – the new century”

-       Maybe also ch. 5 “the trouble with humans, part 1”

-       Pages 240-241 on fanon’s two different books… hmmm

-       Chapter 2, hard core…

Syllabus teaching moment?: Curious about Afropessimism ? Check these starter hits out:

-       “The Future is Black: Afropessimism, Fugitivity, and Radical Hope in Education,” edited by Carl A. Grant, Ashley N. Woodson, Michael J. Dumas.

-       “Doing Time in the (Psychic) Commons,” Frank B. Wilderson III 

-       Could perhaps watch this interview?:

-       Intro to Afropessimism: https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780190280024/obo-9780190280024-0056.xml

-       “Constellations: Capitalism, Antiblackness, Afro-Pessimism, and Black Optimism,” William David Hart, 2018, American Journal of Theology & Philosophy 39(1): 5-33.

Please read for Tuesday the first 18 pages of this pdf:

·      Sylvia Wynter 1999. ""Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, The Puzzle of Conscious Experience, of 'Identity' and What it's like to be 'Black'

I KNOW THE PDF IS MESSED UP! and cuts out the bottom of every page. Let this give you license to read but not get toooo hung up on every word. Try to grasp the overall meaning.

Read Intro, Part 1, and most of Part 2 through page 18.

Focus on Part 2, including

·      “Truly What is to be done is to Set Man Free”: Towards the Sociogenic Principle

·      "Stop Acting Like a Nigger!” On the Qualitative Aspects of the Mental States of The Caribbean Negro Before He Goes to France

THERE ARE of course WAY TOO MANY Readings as originally listed:

·       Sylvia Wynter. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (3): 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.

Or?

·      Sylvia Wynter 1999. ""Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, The Puzzle of Conscious Experience, of 'Identity' and What it's like to be 'Black'

(Bopth are long - i will try to suggest a snippet closer to the date)

·       Camille Robcis. “Frantz Fanon, Institutional Psychotherapy, and the Decolonization of Psychiatry.” Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 81, Number 2, April 2020, pp. 303-325

·       Darryl Li, 2021. “Genres of Universalism: Reading Race into International Law, With Help from Sylvia Wynter.” U.C.L.A. Law Review 1686.

o   This is a lot. Really, the Wynter will be the main point of discussion this entire week. The pieces for today will hopefully be useful for thinking with this work!

Recommended

·       Film: One Flew Over Cuckoo’s Nest, directed by Milos Forman, 1975

Let's read the rest of the sociogenic principle for Thursday (see note from Tuesday)

One is from Isabelle Stengers, particularly in relation to Science with a capital S and what she calls “ontological politics.”

The other is from Margaret Lock, talking about “situated biologies” – perhaps helping us think with relationality and other ways of verb-ing rather than noun-ing?

·       Emily Ng, 2020. A Time of Lost Gods: Mediumship, Madness, and the Ghost after Mao. UC Press.

o   Read Chapter 4: A Soul Adrift.

o   Read Coda

For my synopsis of the book:

http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/beyond-care-and-corruption/

No class in person this day… read and discuss the following:

·       Roseann Liu and Savannah Shange, 2018. “Thick Solidarity: Theorizing Empathy in Social Justice Movements.” Radical History Review 131.

Readings

·       Esmé Wang article, “When Watching a Movie Can Induce Psychosis,” from Vice: https://www.vice.com/en/article/evezva/esme-weijun-wang-the-collected-schizophrenias

·       A Tale of Mental Illness – From the Inside:

o   https://www.ted.com/talks/elyn_saks_a_tale_of_mental_illness_from_the_inside

·       The Voices in My Head:

o   https://www.ted.com/talks/eleanor_longden_the_voices_in_my_head

Readings

·       Our Most Troubling Madness: Case Studies in Schizophrenia Across Cultures, edited by T.M. Luhrmann and Jocelyn Marrow, 2016.

o   Case 6: T.M. Luhrmann and R. Radmavati. “Voices that are More Benign: The Experience of Auditory Hallucinations in Chennai.”

§ NOTE: JUST READ Page 104 (middle of the page) – 111.

·       Louis Sass and Josef Parnas, 2003. “Schizophrenia, Consciousness, and the Self.” Schizophrenia Bulletin 29(3):427-444.

o   NOTE: JUST READ the first two pages to get the main argument. (And of course feel free to read further if your interest is piqued.)

This week are reading "Psychotherapy and Religion in Japan: The Japanese Introspection Practice of Naikan," by Chikako Oxawa-de Silva.

First:

*Read introduction

*Start with the conclusion of chapter 2 - you may want to go back and home in on the comparisons with psychoanalysis, Catholic confession, and Foucault in that chapter

* Read chapter 3 for its "confessions"

Continue reading the book on Naikan

*Read 79 -81 of Chapter 4

*Read page 107, the first page of Chapter 5

Chapter 5 is on interdependent selfhood, please read if you are interested and bring details to class!

Skim the section headings of the other chapters and perhaps read the Epilogue, allowing yourself to read more to follow your interest.

Readings

• adrienne maree brown. “RESILIENCE: how we recover and transform.” From Emergent Strategy:

  Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. AK Press 2017.

Readings

Byron Good, MaryJo Good, Jesse Grayman, 2015. “Is PTSD a ‘Good Enough’ Concept for Postconflict Mental Health? Reflections on Work in Aceh, Indonesia.” From Culture and PTSD: Trauma in Global and Historical Perspective, edited by Devon Hinton and Byron Good.

o   We may want to read the Introduction as well, important background in there...

o   In fact, the entire book is available as an ebook – check it out!