Explores the lived experience of psychosis, trauma, and depression among people of diverse cultural orientations, revealing how mental illness engages fundamental human processes of self, desire, gender, and interpretation. This book focuses on psychological suffering and the social rendering of the mentally ill as nonhuman or not fully human.
"Comfortably traversing the boundaries between anthropology and psychiatry, Jenkins seeks to contextualize what is known as mental illness, taking it beyond the elicitation of symptoms to broader realms of subjective meaning situated within sociocultural influences.... This book is an intellectually engaged yet passionate quest to examine these influences in lives as lived."