Culture, mental health and psychiatry

(CHDV 23301, 33301; ANTH 35115)

Prof. Eugene Raikhel
Fall 2010

Analysis of a mental illness category

The second assignment for this course asks you to choose a mental illness category from this
list and analyze the conditions which have facilitated its emergence and prevalence in
contemporary North American society:

• Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder)

• Social Phobia
• Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
• Anorexia nervosa
• Bulimia nervosa
• Premenstrual dysphoric disorder
• Pathological gambling
• Hoarding Disorder

With the exception of Hoarding disorder, all of these are listed as specific disorders in the
DSM-IV. Hoarding Disorder is being proposed as a category for DSM-V.
For this assignment, you will consider the social, cultural, political economic,
institutional and demographic conditions which have made this particular condition a “way
of going mad” today. What are the underlying assumptions about normalcy and the
behavior of “normal people” being contravened by people categorized as having whatever
particular illness you choose to examine?
The model for your analysis is Ian Hacking’s discussion of the ecological niche in
Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses – the assigned
reading for next week. In his discussion of the fugue state in 19th century France, Hacking
proposes the metaphor of the ecological niche to speak about a mental illnesses which
“appears at a time, in a place, and later fades away,” (1998:1). Like the complex of elements
which shape an ecosystem, a number of medical, institutional, demographic, cultural and
phenomenological vectors serve to facilitate a particular “way of going mad.”
In order for mental illnesses to come into being as medically recognized entities
more is required than the production of a category by experts, Hacking argues. While the
system of medical taxonomy is an important factor facilitating a particular illness, it is not
sufficient, on its own, to explain the actions of patients. In addition to fitting into a medical
taxonomy, Hacking argues that the illness must be observable or legible as disorder of some
kind, it must exist on an axis of cultural valuation running from the romantic to the
pathological, and it must provide “some release [for its sufferers] that is not available
elsewhere in the culture in which it thrives,” (1998: 2). In other words, the question we are
seeking to answer is not simply “Why is this condition being framed as medical or
psychiatric disorder” but also “Why are being engaging in these behaviors or practices or
having these experiences?”
In your analysis, I would like you to use the metaphor of the ecological niche
describe some of the conditions which facilitate the existence of the illness category of your
choice. You do not need to use Hacking’s specific set of “vectors” in a systematic way;
you can come up with your own.
This is NOT a research paper. Aside from the other assigned readings for the
course, the only text that you need to consult is the DSM-IV (or DSM-V in the case of
hoarding) criteria for your chosen illness. I have pasted these into a document available in
the Assignment 2 folder on the Chalk website. If you find it useful to do a little browsing
online to learn more about your chosen category, that is fine, but research is not the goal of
this paper. Instead of conducting research, I want you to draw upon your own
knowledge of North American culture and society, as a person who is studying in that
setting (and in many cases, who has been raised in that setting as well) to think about what
has made this particular disorder a “way of going mad” today?

The final assignment for this course is a 1,200 -1,400 words – that’s four to five pages of
double-spaced 12-point Times New Roman text. The assignment is due at 5pm on
Wednesday November 24. You can turn either turn in a hard copy or email me a file.