Mendenhall has authored several books, including Syndemic Suffering: Social Distress, Depression, and Diabetes among Mexican Immigrant Women (2012, Routledge), Global Mental Health: Anthropological Perspectives (2015, Routledge, with Brandon Kohrt), Rethinking Diabetes: Entanglements with Trauma, Poverty, and HIV (2019, Cornell), Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji (2022, Vanderbilt), and Invisible Illness: A History, from Hysteria to Long Covid (California).[3] In 2017 she led a series in The Lancet on syndemics, the theory of how and why social and health conditions travel together.[4]
Early life and education
Mendenhall was born and raised in Okoboji, Iowa.[5] She attended Davidson College. She earned a Master of Public Health from the Hubert Department of Global Health at Emory University and later completed a PhD in anthropology at Northwestern University. Her thesis introduced the concept of the "VIDDA Syndemic", which comprises five overlapping issues: violence, immigration and isolation, depression, diabetes, and abuse (verbal, emotional, and sexual).[6] In the book, she concluded that women's physical suffering could not be separated from their surrounding environment.[7] This informed her later work, Rethinking Diabetes, which examines the global and local factors that transformed how diabetes was perceived.[8]
Mendenhall completed a Fogarty Fellowship funded by the National Institutes of Health where she was posted at the Public Health Foundation of India in New Delhi. As the first anthropologist to hold this fellowship, she said, "Because I am an anthropologist, and not a doctor or epidemiologist, I am an example of Fogarty taking a risk. Syndemics is a way to bring us all together to have a conversation about how interactions matter so fundamentally to what health and illness mean."[9] She also completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of the Witwatersrand.[10]
Research and career
Mendenhall is a professor at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.[11] She authored a 2017 series in The Lancet on syndemics. In the opening to the series, she argued that "how we think about disease pathologies affects how we design policies and deliver care to those most affected by social and economic inequalities. Conventional frameworks in medicine and public health, such as comorbidity and multimorbidity, often overlook the effects of social, political, and ecological factors...the theory of syndemics improves on conventional frameworks in both theoretical and practical terms by illuminating how macro-level social factors promote disease clustering at the population level and impact disease pathologies at the individual level."[12] She also conducted research in the United States, India, Kenya, and South Africa, focused on how diabetes and distress emerge and interact differently among low-income people facing healthcare challenges across very different contexts.[13]
Additionally, Mendenhall has explored syndemics in Soweto, South Africa. Most of this work has focused on chronic illnesses (particularly type 2 diabetes, depression, breast cancer, and HIV), social challenges like stigma and how people manage living with multiple chronic conditions at once. She also conducted research documenting late-stage breast cancer diagnoses influenced by social and structural barriers.[14][15] She showed that Black women living in Soweto were diagnosed with breast cancer too late for successful treatments and believed that the treatments (e.g. chemotherapy) were much worse than the cancer itself.[16] She called for people to recognise the significance of social and structural drivers of stress.[17][18]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Mendenhall studied how people in northwest Iowa responded to COVID-19.[19] She assessed how failures in state politics, a breakdown in negotiations, and lack of trust in science caused Okoboji to be declared a coronavirus hotspot.[20] This work inspired her book, Unmasked, and was featured in an illustrated article in Sapiens.[21]
Mendenhall, Emily (2016). Syndemic suffering: social distress, depression, and diabetes among Mexican immigrant women. Advances in critical medical anthropology. London: Routledge. ISBN978-1-61132-142-5.
Mendenhall, Emily (2019). Rethinking diabetes: entanglements with trauma, poverty, and HIV. Ithaca [New York]: Cornell University Press. ISBN978-1-5017-3831-9.
Mendenhall, Emily (2022). Unmasked: covid, community, and the case of Okoboji. Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press. ISBN978-0-8265-0454-8.
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