Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Impact of Rapid Socioeconomic Change on Mental Health and Associated Healing Practices

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Increasing rates of socioeconomic change are associated with widespread increases in social distress and related mental illnesses, yet health systems often struggle to develop the capacity and knowledge for responding to mental disorders. Focusing on the biological dimensions of mental illness, scientists predominantly search for biomedical solutions. Recent studies, however, have called into question the effectiveness of biomedical treatment models, noting unexpectedly good mental-illness prognoses among populations with scant historic access to biomedical interventions. These positive prognoses have been attributed to cultural and familial practices. This project, which trains a graduate student in how to conduct rigorous empirically-grounded scientific fieldwork, seeks to understand the impact of rapid socioeconomic change on the mental health and treatment of marginal populations. Cornell University graduate student Ting Hui Lau under the supervision of Dr. Magnus Fiskesjo, will examine indigenous mental illness categories and traditional healing practices in rural Southwest China where ethnic and religious minority populations are undergoing rapid socioeconomic change. Her study includes the following two major components: First, she will document and analyze indigenous illness categories, religious cosmologies, and associated healing practices. Second, she will ethnographically evaluate the transformation of these practices in the context of rapid development. Her project advances social scientific understanding of mental illness by (1) evaluating the impact of rapid social and economic change on marginalized minority communities and their mental health; (2) deepening scholar's and policymaker's understandings of how marginalized communities derive resilience from indigenous spiritual practices in the face of social distress; and (3) contributing to scientific knowledge of the nature and origins of mental illness by giving more consideration to the social and cultural dimensions of mental illness. Methods include participant observation, open-ended interviews, and the collection of life histories, all of which are widely accepted and standard ethnographic approaches for this type of study.