Janis H. Jenkins

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Janis Hunter Jenkins is an American Psychological and Medical Anthropologist. She is Distinguished Professor at the University of California San Diego, [1] on faculty in the Departments of Anthropology, Psychiatry, and the Global Health Program. [2] [3] She is Director for the Center for Global Mental Health at UCSD. [4]

Contents

Jenkins’ research has contributed to the fields of psychological/medical anthropology, cultural psychiatry, global mental health, and culture and emotion. Her research explores how cultural processes and structural institutions shape the experience, course, and outcome of mental health and illness. She has conducted interdisciplinary research among various populations including Mexican immigrants/migrants, Salvadoran refugees, Vietnamese and Iraqi Kurdish refugees, Puerto Rican migrants, Euro-American, Native-American, and African-American populations.

Education

Janis H. Jenkins received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. [5] She completed post-doctoral training as a Fellow in the NIMH-funded program entitled “Clinically Relevant Medical Anthropology” at Harvard Medical School. [6]

Career

Jenkins was appointed Assistant Research Anthropologist in The Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA. She joined the faculty in the Department of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University, [7] and served as Director of the Women’s Studies Program. [8] She is currently a faculty member in the Departments of Anthropology and Psychiatry at UCSD, and Director of the Center for Global Mental Health.

Jenkins has been awarded several visiting and scholarly appointments including Visiting Scholar-in residence at the Russell Sage Foundation, [9] Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Social Medicine, State University of Rio de Janeiro, Research Fellow at the American Philosophical Society, Member-in-Residence at the Institute for Advanced Study, [10] Distinguished Visiting Faculty at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, and Visiting Scholar for the Writing Residency of the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Italy.

Jenkins has been recipient of the Young Investigator Award by the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression. She received the Stirling Award in 1990 by the Society for Psychological Anthropology for the article "Anthropology, Expressed Emotion, and Schizophrenia." [11] She serves on the editorial board of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry: An International Journal of Cross-Cultural Comparative Research, [12] and Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology. [13] She is the President of the American Anthropological Association’s Society for Psychological Anthropology. [14]

She has been awarded research funding from the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health as Principal Investigator for a study on "Sociocultural Factors and Course of Persistent Mental Illness, National Institute of Mental Health” (NIMH Grant MH 47920; 1990-1996) and “Culture, Schizophrenia, and Atypical Antipsychotics” (NIMH Grant R01 MH 60232; 1999-2004), Co-Investigator and Co-Principal Investigator, “Southwest Youth & Experience of Psychiatric Treatment” (NIMH Grant: R01 MH071781). Jenkins served as a member of three scientific review groups for NIMH (“Emotion and Personality,” 1993-1994; "Social, Personality, & Group Processes,” 1994-1998; and “Treatment and Services,” 2003-2005).

In other sources of funding, Jenkins has been awarded research grants for studies on “Cultural Perceptions of Adolescent ‘Bienestar Emocional’ (Emotional Well-Being) and Patterns of Help Seeking: An Anthropological Study in Tijuana, Mexico” (University of California, San Diego, Faculty Senate Grant, 2016-2018); “Well-Being and Mental Health of Adolescents: Community Collaboration and Technological Innovations” (Grant C6009, Frontiers of Innovation Scholars Program, Office Research Affairs, University of California, San Diego, 2017-2020), as well as doctoral dissertation research grants from the National Science Foundation. [15] [16] [17]

Research

A primary focus of Jenkins’ research has been the investigation of cultural meaning and lived experience of mental illness, and the empirical demonstration of how cultural and social structural features shape the course and outcome of mental health/illness.

Jenkins has worked with interdisciplinary research teams that have employed ethnographic and psychiatric methods of interviewing, observation, and assessment. She and her colleagues were first team to complete research to demonstrate the significant roles of “expressed emotion” (familial emotional response to an ill relative) in the course and outcome of schizophrenic illness among Spanish-speaking Mexican-descent families (Karno et al.,1987). [18] This was the first study demonstrating that Mexican immigrants’ familial emotional responses of warmth and sympathy toward mentally ill kin in the United States contributes to a more favorable course of illness than in the case of their Euro-American counterparts. Jenkins and her colleagues have theorized the research construct of “expressed emotion” as multidimensional features of cultural, psychological, biological, ecological, and political economic contexts (Jenkins & Karno, 1992).

Her cross-cultural and transnational studies have included adult and adolescent populations of Mexican, Mexican-American, Salvadoran, Puerto Rican, Euro-American, Vietnamese, African-American, and Native-American populations. These studies have been carried out in home and community settings, including both in-patient and out-patient treatment facilities. Types of illness conditions studied have ranged from psychotic-related conditions, to depression, anxiety, and psychological trauma. Jenkins’ research teams have found that the social and cultural environment of a person living with a mental illness can also shape the societal stigma and discrimination commonly associated with such conditions and treatments such as experiences with antipsychotic medication. [19] [20]

Jenkins formulated the concept of “extraordinary conditions” elaborated in her book, Extraordinary Conditions: Culture and Experience in Mental Illness. This book, along with her subsequent co-authored title, Troubled in The Land of Enchantment: Adolescent Experience of Psychiatric Treatment, explore the cultural shaping of psychological distress, the impress of conditions of structural violence, the fundamental human capacity for struggle, and cultural conceptions of ‘the problem’ (which would be clinically diagnosed as mental disorder) in relation to cultural orientations toward normality/abnormality and the ordinary/extraordinary in everyday human experience. Jenkins’ research has drawn together the centrality of engaged struggle –rather than symptoms - as fundamental to human capacity and experience. [21]

Jenkins’ ethnographic research conducted in environments of political violence has elucidated the role of the nation-state in constructing what she terms “a political ethos,” defined as “culturally organized feeling and sentiment pertaining to social domains of power and interest” (Jenkins, 1991, p. 140). These studies have identified several culturally specific bodily transactions of emotions, such as the experience of el calor (intense heat) among Salvadoran refugees and nervios among Mexican-American populations. Jenkins works to promote interdisciplinary research and intervention for global mental health on a broad scale for all worldwide. [22] [23] [24]

Selected publications

Books

Articles

Related Research Articles

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Psychological anthropology is an interdisciplinary subfield of anthropology that studies the interaction of cultural and mental processes. This subfield tends to focus on ways in which humans' development and enculturation within a particular cultural group—with its own history, language, practices, and conceptual categories—shape processes of human cognition, emotion, perception, motivation, and mental health. It also examines how the understanding of cognition, emotion, motivation, and similar psychological processes inform or constrain our models of cultural and social processes. Each school within psychological anthropology has its own approach.

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References

  1. ↑ "Faculty". anthropology.ucsd.edu.
  2. ↑ "Non-Salaried Faculty". psychiatry.ucsd.edu.
  3. ↑ "Global Health Program Faculty". globalhealthprogram.ucsd.edu.
  4. ↑ "Director's Welcome". cgmh.ucsd.edu.
  5. ↑ "https://search.library.ucla.edu/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=alma9918265253606533&context=L&vid=01UCS_LAL:UCLA&lang=en&search_scope=ArticlesBooksMore&adaptor=Local+Search+Engine&tab=Articles_books_more_slot&query=any,contains,Jenkins,+Janis+1984+dissertation". search.library.ucla.edu.{{cite web}}: External link in |title= (help)
  6. ↑ "Previous Fellowship Programs". ghsm.hms.harvard.edu.
  7. ↑ "Case Western Reserve University College of Arts & Sciences". case.edu.
  8. ↑ "CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY GENERAL BULLETIN 1998- 2000.pdf". Google Docs.
  9. ↑ "Visiting Scholars | RSF". www.russellsage.org.
  10. ↑ "Janis Hunter Jenkins - Scholars | Institute for Advanced Study". www.ias.edu. 9 December 2019.
  11. ↑ "Stirling Award – SPA". stirling.
  12. ↑ "Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry". Springer.
  13. ↑ "Ethos".
  14. ↑ "Board of directors – SPA". director.
  15. ↑ "NSF Award Search: Award # 1026819 - Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Effects of Immigration on Local Understandings of Mental Health". www.nsf.gov.
  16. ↑ "NSF Award Search: Award # 0921535 - Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Lived Experiences of Asylum Seekers in the Urban Midwest". www.nsf.gov.
  17. ↑ "NSF Award Search: Award # 2241628 - Doctoral Dissertation Research: Adolescent Experiences of Social Support in Educational Trajectories". www.nsf.gov.
  18. ↑ Bhugra, Dinesh; McKenzie, Kwame (September 2003). "Expressed emotion across cultures". Advances in Psychiatric Treatment. 9 (5): 342–348. doi:10.1192/apt.9.5.342. ISSN   1355-5146.
  19. ↑ Martínez-Hernáez, Ángel; Pié-Balaguer, Asun; Serrano-Miguel, Mercedes; Morales-Sáez, Nicolás; García-Santesmases, Andrea; Bekele, Deborah; Alegre-Agís, Elisa (1 February 2020). "The collaborative management of antipsychotic medication and its obstacles: A qualitative study". Social Science & Medicine. 247: 112811. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.112811. PMID   32032839. S2CID   211063712.
  20. ↑ Myers, Neely Laurenzo (1 September 2010). "Culture, Stress and Recovery from Schizophrenia: Lessons from the Field for Global Mental Health". Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry. 34 (3): 500–528. doi:10.1007/s11013-010-9186-7. PMC   3068598 . PMID   20571905.
  21. ↑ Myers, Neely; Yarris, Kristin E. (March 2019). "Extraordinary Conditions: Global Psychiatric Care and the Anthropology of Moral Experience". Ethos. 47: 3–12. doi:10.1111/etho.12224. S2CID   151278941.
  22. ↑ Hinton, Devon E.; Lewis-Fernández, Roberto (September 2011). "The cross-cultural validity of posttraumatic stress disorder: implications for DSM-5". Depression and Anxiety. 28 (9): 783–801. doi:10.1002/da.20753. PMID   21910185. S2CID   3956077.
  23. ↑ Bhugra, D. (April 2004). "Migration and mental health". Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica. 109 (4): 243–258. doi:10.1046/j.0001-690X.2003.00246.x. PMID   15008797. S2CID   30835955.
  24. ↑ Lewis-Fernández, Roberto; Kleinman, Arthur (1 September 1995). "Cultural Psychiatry: Theoretical, Clinical, and Research Issues". Psychiatric Clinics of North America. 18 (3): 433–448. doi:10.1016/S0193-953X(18)30033-9.


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