Doctoral Dissertation Research: Stories at the Border of Mind and Body: Stress, Distress, and Diabetes among Mexican and Mexican-American Women in Chicago

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Doctoral student Emily Mendenhall (Northwestern University), supervised by Dr. Rebecca Seligman, will undertake research on the relationship between the folk models for disease causality and control, and psychological and physiological health outcomes. This research contributes to broader understandings of mind-body interactions by investigating the relationship of traumatic experiences both to mental and physical health outcomes, and their overlap.The research will focus on diabetes and will be conducted among low-income Mexican and Mexican-American women living in Chicago. The research builds upon a small body of research that demonstrates that Mexicans and Mexican-Americans often implicate stress and emotional distress in diabetes causality. The researcher will investigate the possibility that the significance of disease narratives about stressful and often traumatic experiences may reveal more than simply "folk models" and/or non-biomedical beliefs. The researcher will gather data through diabetes lifestyle questionnaires, anthropometric measures, biomarkers, psychiatric inventories, and in-depth qualitative interviews to (1) determine how individuals communicate psychological and social suffering in health narratives; (2) investigate the relationship between trauma exposure and mental health among women living with diabetes; and (3) examine the relationships among psychological and social suffering reported in diabetes narratives, psychological distress, and diabetes outcomes. By developing a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which individuals use diabetes as an idiom of distress, the researcher will measure how suffering revealed in diabetes narratives may be inscribed in both mind and body. The research is important because it will contribute to social scientific theory about the connections between mind, culture, and biology. It also has application to understanding differences between individuals with good and poor diabetes outcomes, and may suggest new directions for intervention. Finally, supporting this research supports the education of a social scientist.