Modernity and malevolence in the psychiatric clinic anxious selves in urban and rural south India / Andrew C. Willford.
| Author/creator | Willford, Andrew C. |
| Format | Electronic |
| Publication Info | Honolulu : University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2025. |
| Description | x, 294 pages illustrations, map 24 cm |
| Supplemental Content | Full text available from eBooks on EBSCOhost |
| Subjects |
| Portion of title | Anxious selves in urban and rural south India |
| Physical medium | illustrations |
| Physical medium | maps |
| Contents | Introduction: Two Deaths -- Shame, Stigma, and the Normalizing Impulse -- Rebellion and Abandonment: Excess and Antinomy -- Singularities and their Discontents -- Living with Urban Stress: Anxiety, IT, and Burnout in the New Economy -- Seizures, "Fits," and Neurology -- Conclusion: Social Dimensions of Mental Illness and Care. |
| Abstract | "This ethnography of clinical care at NIMHANS (National Institute for Mental Health and Neuro Sciences), the leading mental health care institution in India, offers a phenomenologically rich observation of patients interacting with physicians, along with interviews and observations of psychiatrists and neurologists. Recognizing patterns of psycho-social causation associated with the contemporary pressures of modernity in India frame the key questions and analysis of this work. Hundreds of patients travel to NIMHANS' outpatient department (OPD) daily constraining upon both patient and doctor time. A stigma attached to mental illness leads patients and their families seeking a "tablet," in hope of symptom alleviation. Admission for psychotherapy sessions risks revealing oneself as "mentally ill" to one's extended family and community with consequences for one's social standing. This is a conundrum doctors and patients face, and one, that constrains treatment options. Troubled identities within urban modernity are also marked by sociocultural changes within public discourse, producing new demands upon vulnerable subjects. Changing bodily disciplines associated with modernist and/or reformed versions of religion contributes to increasingly rigid social boundaries, frustrating aspirations and producing somatic illness and/or possessions by malevolent unseen forces. This violence drives somatization, particularly as colloquially diagnosed within the clinic as "hysteria," a term that does both analytical and descriptive work for physicians and within my analysis of their usage of this troubled term, now given renewed relevance against neuro-genetic determinism. The book also reveals an increasing and symptomatic inability to think flexibly about categories of good and evil and self vs. other. Clinical symptoms are seen to be exacerbated by emergent religious and political imaginaries that sharpen social divides, are judgmental, and lead to overzealous attachments to identities. The author argue argues, in turn, that the "madness" in these cases is produced by impossible demands for singular identities within modern life that suppress more fluid traces of subjectivity and the complex histories that produce them"-- Provided by publisher. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Access restriction | Available only to authorized users. |
| Technical details | Mode of access: World Wide Web |
| Genre/form | Electronic books. |
| LCCN | 2025010864 |
| ISBN | 9798880701377 hardback |
| ISBN | epub |
| ISBN | kindle edition |
| ISBN |
Availability
| Library | Location | Call Number | Status | Item Actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Electronic Resources | Access Content Online | ✔ Available |