Troubled in the Land of Enchantment
Troubled in the Land of Enchantment
Adolescent Experience of Psychiatric Treatment
Janis H. Jenkins and Thomas J. Csordas
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
University of California Press
Oakland, California
2020 by Thomas J. Csordas and Janis H. Jenkins
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Csordas, Thomas J., author. | Jenkins, Janis H., author.
Title: Troubled in the land of enchantment : adolescent experience of psychiatric treatment / Thomas J. Csordas and Janis H. Jenkins.
Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020001564 (print) | LCCN 2020001565 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520343511 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520343528 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520975019 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH : Adolescent psychotherapyResidential treatmentNew Mexico. | Adolescent psychiatryNew Mexico. | Psychiatric hospital careNew Mexico.
Classification: LCC RJ 504.5 . C 78 2020 (print) | LCC RJ 504.5 (ebook) | DDC 616.89/140835dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001564
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001565
Manufactured in the United States of America
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Contents
Acknowledgments
The collaborative project of which this book is the outcome was funded by National Institute of Mental Health Grant no. RO1 MH07178101, Southwest Youth and the Experience of Psychiatric Treatment, Thomas J. Csordas and Janis H. Jenkins, Co-Principal Investigators. Our logistically complex, geographically dispersed, and emotionally strenuous ethnography in New Mexico benefited greatly from the contributions of skilled and intrepid doctoral student fieldworkers Bridget Haas and Whitney Duncan. Child psychiatrist Michael Stork, MD, and clinical psychologist Mary Bancroft, PhD, artfully and empathically accomplished the work of conducting research diagnostic interviews. Elisa Dimass assistance with recruitment of research participants was invaluable. Back in California at our UC San Diego research offices, graduate students Heather Hallman and Allen Tran worked intensively on the first phase of data organization and preparation, and later conducted fieldwork (not reported in this volume) with a comparison group of nonpatient adolescents. In addition, many UCSD graduate and undergraduate students assisted with the extensive task of interview transcription and data entry, including Jessica Hsueh, Nofit Itzhak, Jessica Novak, Celeste Padilla, Marisa Peeters, Leah Retherford, Amy Rothschild, Ellen Kozelka, Farah Bishay, Nicholas Locke, Mania Mgdysian, Cassidy Shapiro, and Shayna Orensztein. Alexis Burnstan, Alexandra Pryor, and Giselle Sanchez assisted with final preparation and submission of data tables and figures.
We are grateful to the colleagues at the following institutions who have invited us to speak about this research as we have developed it over the course of several years. Each of these occasions afforded us the opportunity to advance our analysis and benefit from many astute questions and insightful observations: the Resident Members Seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; Seminar in Medical Anthropology of the Departments of Global Health and Social Medicine and of Anthropology at Harvard University; Conference on Critical Research on Culture, Psychiatry, and Mental Health at Harvard University; Mind, Medicine, and Culture Seminar in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA; Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago; Humanities Institute and Institute for the History of Production of Knowledge at New York University; Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research at the University of California San Diego; Institute of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen; Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics; cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris; Conference on Emotional Experience in Narratives of Depression at Freie Universitt Berlin; Workshop on Phenomenology of Depression at Durham University UK; Conference on Psychiatry, Religion, and Healing at Westflische Wilhelms-Universitt Mnster; Department of Anthropology at Universitt Osnabrck; Interdisciplinary Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Studies at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Santiago; Proyecto Oferta Teraputica Religiosa para Frmaco-dependientes at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana; Instituto de Ciencias Antropolgicas at the Universidad de Buenos Aires; Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University; and School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University. In addition, we are pleased to have been able to present findings from this research on more than one occasion to the meetings of each of the following associations: the Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture, the American Anthropological Association, and the Society for Psychological Anthropology.
We are immensely grateful to Medical Director David Mullen, MD, and the other highly skilled and dedicated health care providers at the Childrens Psychiatric Center who supported this research and provided useful feedback during presentation of our findings and interpretations. Our heartfelt thanks go to the wonderful circle of family and friends who have been the lifeblood of support during the many years of doing this massive project and writing this book. Particular thanks to our two children, now adults, for the many occasions and long periods of being relocated to New Mexico, away from their home and friends. Living as a family in the research project house during the first year of the fieldwork, their presence helped to ground us during particularly arduous periods of ethnography. Hearty thanks to our daughter for her comments and keen editorial eye for the final wrap. Thanks also to Bridget Haas (ethnographic research team member), who provided feedback and clarifications of terms we deploy in particular parts of the book. We thank UC Press for the editorial expertise of Kate Marshall and the production work of Enrique Ochoa-Kaup and Emilia Thiuri. Thanks as well to our expert indexer, Amron Gravett. We also thank the three peer reviewers for feedback of value in revisions. Finally, we are indebted to all who participated in this research by allowing us extended time together in homes, neighborhoods, and clinical settings. Learning about your life experiences has been an anthropological privilege and challenge. We are deeply grateful.
Prelude
New Mexico is a place we have known for nearly three decades now, returning for various lengths of time for collaborative research in which each of us has individually been involved, on topics including Native American healing, refugees from political violence, and adult and child mental health. Our first extended sojourn there togethertwo anthropologists, one pregnantwas in 1991, when we lived in a silver spray-painted cabin with marginal plumbing, a couple electrical outlets, and heat from a woodstove. The silver cabin was situated high among ponderosa pines in the foothills of the serenely imposing Chuska Mountains, referred to in the local community of Crystal as the Navajo Alps. Crystal was where our anthropological forebear Edward Sapir had once worked and where we first observed the Navajo practice of setting a table with a big cylindrical carton of Morton salt instead of a puny shaker.
