Doctoral Dissertation Research: Violence, Structural Inequality, and Institutionalization

从19世纪精神病院的兴起到20世纪50年代开始的去机构化努力，美国的州立医院在从业者、政府官员和公众中引起了相当大的讨论。这个博士论文项目将通过对过去被制度化的人的骨骼分析来研究制度化的生物学影响。这项研究将促进我们对制度化的理解，而不仅仅是从历史记录中收集，并为未来的生物人类学研究提供一个框架，以纳入跨学科的方法。该研究可能提高心理健康意识，并提出了一种将过去制度化样本的健康差异与现代精神病学治疗联系起来的创新方法。该项目将支持研究生培训以及公众和后代社区科学参与。本论文研究使用来自四个州（科罗拉多州，密西西比州，密苏里州和俄亥俄州）收容所的骨骼样本，以了解监禁如何影响制度化妇女的健康，以及它如何在不同的祖先和地理区域中有所不同。在生物考古学中，可以通过不同的骨骼病理看到证据，这些病理反映了人们一生中所忍受的消极条件的健康差异。分析将集中于骨骼创伤、疾病和骨折分析，这些分析将通过层次对数线性分析和二项逻辑回归进行统计检验。该项目强调了过去精神制度化在社会文化和历史背景下的异质生理影响。它调查在制度化的地理样本中是否存在骨骼健康和流行病学差异或趋势，并试图确定非裔美国人和欧美人群体之间的创伤和疾病模式是否存在差异，以便深入了解种族主义和隔离在机构环境中的影响。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

State hospitals in the United States have generated considerable discussion among practitioners, government officials, and the general public, from the rise of the asylum in the 19th-century through deinstitutionalization efforts originating in the 1950s. This doctoral dissertation project will examine the biological impact of institutionalization through skeletal analysis of persons who were institutionalized in the past. The research will advance our understanding of institutionalization beyond what can be gleaned from historical accounts alone, and offers a framework for future biological anthropology research to incorporate interdisciplinary approaches. The research may raise mental health awareness and presents an innovative method of linking health disparities in past institutionalized samples to modern-day psychiatric treatment. The project will support graduate training as well as public and descendant community science engagement.This dissertation research uses skeletal samples from asylums in four states (Colorado, Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio) to understand how incarceration impacts institutionalized women’s health and how it is differentially embodied across ancestry and geographical region. In bioarchaeology, evidence can be seen through varying skeletal pathologies that reflect health disparities indicative of negative conditions that people endured during life. The analysis will focus on skeletal trauma, disease, and fracture analysis which will be statistically examined through hierarchical log-linear analysis and binomial logistic regression. The project highlights the heterogeneous physiological impact of past mental institutionalization in their socio-cultural and historical contexts. It investigates whether skeletal health and epidemiological differences or trends exist across institutionalized geographical samples and attempts to determine if differences in trauma and disease patterns between African-American and Euro-American groups are present in order to gain insight into the impact of racism and segregation within the institutional setting.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.