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Global Mental Health and Adolescent Anxiety: Kin, Care and Struggle in New Mexico

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Abstract

While recent developments within the field of global mental health have illuminated the reality of serious mental health difficulties worldwide, particularly in low-income settings, research that focuses on children and adolescents remains underdeveloped. This is especially the case with respect to ethnographic studies of lived experience of adolescents diagnosed with serious mental health conditions. Drawing from an interdisciplinary study of adolescents in New Mexico who were afflicted with a broad range of disorders according to contemporary research diagnostic criteria, this article focuses on anxiety-related conditions with respect to subjective experience and social–ecological contexts of living with such conditions. We offer preliminary observations regarding the value of linking ethnographic and research diagnostic data to address questions of resilience, endurance, capacity and struggle. These observations are intended as the basis for the formulation of more precise hypotheses about adolescent anxiety, kin, and care under conditions of structural violence marked by psychological, residential, and intergenerational adversity.

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Notes

  1. Research for this article was supported by the National Institute for Mental Health Research Grant #R01 MH071781, Thomas J. Csordas and Janis H. Jenkins, Co-Principal Investigators. See Jenkins (2015a, b) and Csordas and Jenkins (forthcoming) for further background and description of this study.

  2. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a diagnostic category that incorporates significant features of anxiety diagnosis; however, for analyses within this study, we have empirically determined the utility of separate and specific analysis of the phenomenological dynamics of this disorder in its own right (Jenkins 2015a, b). While PSTD has been extensively utilized and critiqued with respect to cultural validity, the particular patterning of this disorder is empirically coherent enough to make it a valuable starting point for anthropological and clinical analysis (Hinton and Good 2016).

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  1. University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Janis H. Jenkins & Annika Stone

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Jenkins, J.H., Stone, A. Global Mental Health and Adolescent Anxiety: Kin, Care and Struggle in New Mexico. Cult Med Psychiatry 41, 609–629 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-017-9542-y

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