Topics in Anthropology (290-0-2)
Topic
Madness and Media
Instructors
Rebecca A Seligman
847/491-7207
1810 Hinman Ave., Room #204, EV Campus
Rebecca Seligman is a medical and psychological anthropologist who focuses on transcultural psychiatry, or the study of mental health in cross-cultural perspective. Her past research has explored the connection between mental health and religious participation in a spirit possession religion in Northeastern Brazil. Seligman is an expert in the study of ritual trance and altered states of consciousness. Her current research focuses on mental and physical health among Latino youth in the U.S. This project examines how sociocultural influences on the ways in which Latino youth conceptualize and experience their emotions, relationships, and ultimately, their sense of self, affect help seeking and the experience of mental health care. She has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, and her work has appeared in Discover Magazine.
Meeting Info
Harris Hall L28: Wed 2:00PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
In what appears to be an age of unprecedented global distress, what is the role of media in shaping discourses, representations, and experiences of mental illness? Western psychiatric frameworks are increasingly defining mental health/illness around the world via multilateral health organizations that intervene across cultural contexts. These frameworks are also circulated via Western media narratives that shape the meanings people associate with mental health and illness. What other narratives of mental health might be told? What experiences of distress and resilience are obscured by these dominant frameworks? In this course, students will learn about the ways in which cultural meanings and social structures shape mental distress and how it is expressed and experienced by people across time and context. We will critically examine dominant U.S. models of mental health and illness and ask what underlying cultural assumptions and expectations about self, personhood, emotion, mind, body, well-being and success are embedded in these narratives. We will explore how representations in film and television serve to reflect, reinforce, or re-imagine such assumptions and analyze the political and social implications and power dynamics associated with certain ways of thinking about and depicting mental health. Through a combination of engagement with scholarship on culture and mental health, media studies, and our own critical analyses of media objects from film and television, we will explore these questions and work to generate creative and collaborative ideas about how to rewrite media narratives, in order to better reflect the broad spectrum of experience.
Learning Objectives
"--Pose questions about mental health and media narratives effectively;
--Identify and evaluate evidence related to different perspectives on mental health;
--Analyze media representation using the concepts and tools from class;
--Construct persuasive arguments and evaluate the critiques and arguments of others"
Class Materials (Required)
"Harper, Stephen. Madness and Media: Class, Gender and Race in Popular Representations of Mental Distress ISBN: 0230218806
PDF articles on Canvas"