Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Effects of Immigration on Local Understandings of Mental Health

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Doctoral student, Whitney L. Duncan, with the guidance of her advisor Dr. Janis H. Jenkins, will undertake research on a specific aspect of globalization: the spread of Euroamerican psychiatric and psychological practices and ideologies to new sites around the world, where local understandings of emotion and illness are being impacted in multiple ways. The study will investigate if and how globalizing mental health ideologies are changing local medical systems, conceptions about what it means to be emotionally stable, what therapeutic modalities are appropriate for those who are not stable, and the subjective experience of emotional distress. The research will be carried out in the local context of Oaxaca, Mexico. Over the past two decades, Oaxaca has seen dramatic increases in diagnosed mental illnesses, a spike in the availability of psychiatric and psychological services, and an unprecedented demand for mental healthcare. This multi-sited ethnographic study investigates how and why the growth in mental healthcare has occurred and what impact it is having on Oaxacans' conceptions and experiences of emotional distress. Ethnographic research will be carried out in the capital city of Oaxaca de Juárez as well as in the indigenous Mixteca region, where emigration is ubiquitous. The investigator will conduct long-term participant observation, structured, semi-structured, and life history interviews, and sociolinguistic analysis of casual interactions. The research is important because it will provide an ethnographic account of the cultural context of emotion, illness, and healing in a particular locale, and will advance theoretical understanding of how those aspects of social life and subjectivity change under competing local and global discourses. Conducting the proposed study in Oaxaca at this moment of cultural change and social flux will illuminate the effects globalizing mental health practices and discourses are having at the local level. The results of the research also will help practitioners working with Mexican migrant communities in the United States. Funding the research supports the education of a graduate student.