Clinical Ethnography Research and Training

Clinical ethnography is an approach to mental illness, using the methods of anthropology and of psychology, which builds upon the Committee's long-standing tradition of research emphasizing the comparative study of persons over the entire life course in the context of culture and community.

 

What sets this program apart from others is our insistence on the student's exposure both to anthropological methods and to contemporary psychological and psychiatric knowledge of mental illness. We are committed to the view that even the most organic of serious mental illnesses are shaped by social context, and that the symptoms and prognoses of illness may shift across historical, cultural and social boundaries. We understand our goal as trying to understand the nature of these transformations and the social mechanisms behind them, and we believe that careful, in-depth ethnographic study is the best way in which to document the patterns of psychiatric distress in a particular settingÑbe that setting a rural village or a western clinic. But in order to do this work, we believe, the student must acquire an appreciation for the lived reality of mental illness, for its obduracy and force in human lives. We train students carefully in the available knowledge about these illnesses before we attempt to unpack the way in which class, gender, race and culture may be implicated in that knowledge. As a result, students are able to recognize the mental illness as it appears to mental health professionals, and to incorporate the quantitative epidemiological knowledge about these illnesses into their qualitative work. They are then able to communicate their ideas not only to anthropologistsÑbut also to mental health professionals, who are slowly beginning to realize the importance of the social context of mental illness but are often at a loss as to how to understand or approach it.

To this end we offer the following:
Ethnographic training in the understanding of a particular culture. The Committee on Human Development has five anthropologists on the faculty, and the University of Chicago has one of the best anthropology departments in the country. Students are able to develop linguistic competence in their area of study and a rich understanding of the historical and cultural background, whether that setting be a particular region or the context of the western clinic. Some sense of the range of expertise in area studies and in science studies can be gained from the workshops available at the university.

Clinical exposure in settings in which psychiatric illness is diagnosed and treated. The Committee on Human Development has an informal relationship with the university's department of psychiatry, and other local clinical settings, through which students are to attend clinical case conferences, clinical rounds and psychiatric clinics as if they were medical students. Students are able to apply for and become trained in ÒpracticumÓ settings, in which they are trained in diagnosis and therapy, even if they do not wish to undertake the entire burden of licensure-training in clinical psychology. Those who wish to develop deeper clinical skills should see the description of our clinical psychology program.

The clinical ethnography workshop. This workshop, which meets biweekly throughout the academic year, tries to maintain a productive tension between clinical perspectives and cultural/ethnographic perspectives. Tanya Luhrmann (an anthropologist) and Bert Cohler (a psychoanalyst and psychologist) serve as the faculty advisors, and we often have in attendance Susie Fisher (a practicing psychoanalyst and psychiatrist), Rich Shweder (an anthropologist and cultural psychologist) and our NIH postdoctoral fellows. We use clinical perspectives to look at cultural issues, and anthropologist perspectives to look at clinical puzzles, and we commit to a pluralistic theoretical orientation.