Pathologies of the West: An Anthropology of Mental Illness in Europe and America (Paperback)

Roland Littlewood (author)

£28.99

Paperback 336 Pages
Published: 29/08/2002

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Synopsis

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.

Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801487439
Number of pages: 336
Weight: 510 g
Dimensions: 216 x 140 x 23 mm

MEDIA REVIEWS

"Littlewood. . . looks at both Western and non-Western psychiatric phenomena within broader behavioral categories. . . Since psychiatrists and psychologists tend to focus on the more practical aspects of cross-cultural psychiatry, this title will find its most willing audience among cultural anthropologists. For academic and research libraries."-Library Journal, June 2002
"Littlewood draws on more than two decades of international research to broaden the understanding of the dynamic interaction between culture and mental health. . . . Littlewood's discussion of culture-bound, local illnesses advances the sharing of anthropology and psychiatry. . . . Summing Up: Recommended."-Choice, May 2003, Vol. 40, No. 9
"Roland Littlewood is already well known for his contribution to socially contextualised psychiatric literature, and his book not only reprises some themes, such as its cultural relativity and social construction, but takes them further by applying an anthropologist's eye to the West; this time we (the West) are the exotic, and very peculiar we seem too. . . . There are parts of this book that are quite irresistible. He charts a historical course drawing out the consistent inconsistencies of psychiatric nosology with a rather amused tone. "Isn't it all fascinating?" he seems to be saying. There are great strengths in the ways he blends together insights from other disciplines to situate psychiatry firmly within the expressions of cultural values and social mediation that define ourselves to ourselves."-Mark Welch, Ph.D.
"This is a volume of interpretations by a gifted observer of clinical phenomena in relation to the sociocultural contexts in which they occur. Entertaining and, one suspects, often clinically useful, the interpretations reflect the erudition and experience of the interpreter."-The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, March 2004, vol. 192, no. 3