Posts tagged illness

Alhough the standard psychiatric diagnostic manual relegates 'culture-bound' illnesses to an exotic appendix at the end of the book, Western conceptions of mental illness are themselves 'culture-bound'—an observation close to my historian-of-science's heart, and one well-explored in both Watters' article and in this thoughtful commentary.

re: cultural worlds, illness, medicine, psychiology

Nate:

No one would suggest that we withhold our medical advances from other countries, but it’s perhaps past time to admit that even our most remarkable scientific leaps in understanding the brain haven’t yet created the sorts of cultural stories from which humans take comfort and meaning. When these scientific advances are translated into popular belief and cultural stories, they are often stripped of the complexity of the science and become comically insubstantial narratives. Take for instance this Web site text advertising the antidepressant Paxil: “Just as a cake recipe requires you to use flour, sugar and baking powder in the right amounts, your brain needs a fine chemical balance in order to perform at its best.” The Western mind, endlessly analyzed by generations of theorists and researchers, has now been reduced to a batter of chemicals we carry around in the mixing bowl of our skulls.

All cultures struggle with intractable mental illnesses with varying degrees of compassion and cruelty, equanimity and fear. Looking at ourselves through the eyes of those living in places where madness and psychological trauma are still embedded in complex religious and cultural narratives, however, we get a glimpse of ourselves as an increasingly insecure and fearful people. Some philosophers and psychiatrists have suggested that we are investing our great wealth in researching and treating mental illness — medicalizing ever larger swaths of human experience — because we have rather suddenly lost older belief systems that once gave meaning and context to mental suffering.

I don't know if there's any city in North America that has its own catacombs, at least in the European sense. My impression is that our old urban graves tend to be dealt with as a rarity: something to be either quietly obliterated, whisked away to pathology departments, or turned into permanent memorials. But those measures don't seem like the same sort of cultural coexistance with the dead in number as described in this book review. I find the idea of taking an escalator up through the former site of a plague-pit to be particularly exciting.

re: cultural worlds, death, gardens and cities, illness, medicine

Nate:

That is why the Great Plague of 1665 has been largely understood as a London phenomenon. The sites of old plague pits are now pointed out with understandable pride. Richard Barnett reveals that the escalator at Camden Town Underground station passes through a vast grave for plague victims, and that a “massive plague pit” is responsible for the low ceiling of the basement of Harvey Nichols. It would be fair to say that he takes a certain, rather morbid, pleasure in compiling this Baedeker of disease and suffering. But why not? This is London’s real heritage. Together with this volume are a glossary and six maps, so that the reader can make his or her way down the various roads to oblivion. If you wish to follow the course of tropical disease as it ate its way to the heart of the metropolis, you can do so; you can follow the route of the plague, or the life of an 18th-century medical student. All human life, and human death, is here.