Chicago's Netherworld: An Ethnography of Psychosis on the Street

Many people who struggle with psychotic disorder often refuse offers of help, including housing, extended by mental health services. This talk uses the ethnographic method to examine the reasons for such refusal among women who are homeless and psychiatrically ill in the institutional circuit in an urban area of Chicago. It concludes that such refusals arise not only from a lack of insight but also from the local culture's ascription of meaning to being "crazy."

Tanya Luhrmann, PhD is a professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department. Her interests include the social construction of psychological experience, and the way that social practice may affect even the most concrete ways in which people experience their world. Her first project was a detailed study of the way apparently reasonable people come to believe apparently unreasonable beliefs (“Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft”, Harvard, 1989). Her second project explored the self-criticism of a postcolonial India elite, the result of colonial identification with the colonizers (“The Good Parsi”, Harvard 1996). Her third book identified two cultures with the American profession of psychiatry and examined the way these different cultures encouraged two different forms of empathy and two different understandings of mental illness (“Of Two Minds”, Knopf, 2000). She trained at the University of Cambridge (PhD 1986), and taught for many years at the University of California San Diego. Prior to coming to Stanford she was the Max Palevsky Professor and a director of the Clinical Ethnography project in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. She currently has two projects, one on the experience of psychosis among homeless women, and the other on the way experientially oriented Christians learn to hear the voice of God. She is interested, among other questions, in specifying the ways that spiritual experience and psychotic symptoms differ systematically.

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