Janis H. Jenkins

Dr. Janis Hunter Jenkins is a psychological/medical anthropologist with expertise on culture and mental health. She received her Ph.D. from UCLA and post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School. She has taught on the faculty at Harvard University, Case Western Reserve University, and UC San Diego. At UC San Diego, Dr. Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Psychiatry. She is also on faculty for the Global Health Program and Director of the Center for Global Mental Health at UC San Diego. Within the Department of Anthropology, Professor Janis Jenkins is a member of the Psychological/Medical Anthropology subfield. She is the President of the American Anthropological Association's Society for Psychological Anthropology.

Her principal interests are cultural processes and structural institutions that shape mental health and illness worldwide. Her theoretical formulation entails conceptualizing mental illness as a fundamental human possibility, capacity, and process that affects all humans, to greater or lesser degrees, and for varying temporal periods. What is fundamental is the inextricability of culture, biology, psyche, and social world. Attention to human life and structures as rife with possibilities that are contingent rather than invariant provides the foundation for social, personal, and political transformation. Her formulation of "extraordinary conditions" (2015, 2020) integrates the reciprocal production of personal distress and conditions that are culturally and historically diagnosed as mental disorder, on the one hand, and structural adversity in variety of forms that encompass poverty, racism, misogyny, discrimination and social stigma surrounding mental illness, and inadequacy of healthcare. 

Additional focal areas are feminist theory and subjectivity within domains of lived experience of the self, emotion, gender, and sexuality. Dr. Jenkins works with families, adults, children and adolescents in studies of culturally diverse refugee, migrant, and immigrant populations. These studies have been carried out prior to and during the coronavirus pandemic. Studies have concerned political violence, economic precarity, and endemic racism, particularly among Latinx and Mexican populations. Taken overall, her studies of mental health and illness have led her to theorize "struggle" (Jenkins 2015, 2020) as far more central to illness processes than symptoms. She maintains that when it comes to "mental illness," there can be no such thing as individual pathology. Her studies of global mental health include psychoses, depression, anxiety, PTSD, and the globalization of psychopharmacology to include her formulation of the "pharmaceutical self" and "pharmaceutical imaginary."

Professor Jenkins has been a Fellow or Visiting Faculty across a variety of academic institutions, including as a Visiting Scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center (2021), and a permanent Member of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey (in residence academic year 2011-2012). During 2013, she was Distinguished Visiting Faculty at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.  The American Philosophical Society awarded her a year-long appointment in 2004, and in 2002 she was Visiting Professor in the Department of Health and Human Sciences, Institute of Social Medicine, State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Russell Sage Foundation appointed her as Visiting Scholar-in-Residence in New York City (1996-1997).  At the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Jenkins has been active as a Member of three different Scientific Review Groups (1993-2005). Professor Jenkins has also been elected President of the Women’s Faculty Association (1991-1993) and appointed Director of Women’s Studies at Case Western Reserve University (1994-2000). At Harvard Medical School, she was appointed Research Fellow, Instructor, and Head Preceptor in the Departments of Social Medicine, Anthropology, and Psychiatry from 1986-1990. From 1984-1986, she was appointed as Assistant Research Anthropologist at UCLA in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences. 

Dr. Jenkins is a member of the Editorial Boards for Medical Anthropology Quarterly, (Society for Medical Anthropology) and Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, for which she has also served as Co-Editor (1995-2000); she has also served a term on the Editorial Board of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry: An International Journal of Cross-Cultural Comparative Research.  She has served as elected member and ex officio (as Co-Editor of Ethos) of the Board of Directors for the Society for Psychological Anthropology (1992-2000). 

Dr. Jenkins has conducted interdisciplinary research in the United States and Mexico.  In the U.S., she has worked with Mexican immigrants/migrants, Salvadoran refugees, Vietnamese and Iraqi Kurdish refugees, Puerto Rican migrants, and other Spanish-speaking Latinos, as well as comparative research for Euro-Americans, Native Americans, and African American populations.   The sites of Professor Jenkins’ research include everyday settings such as homes, neighborhoods, clinics, and schools.

She is notable among anthropologists for a career having an ongoing research program as Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator for a series of grants funded by National Institute for Mental Health (1986-2011).  In addition, she has received funding for her research from the American Philosophical Association, the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, and the Department of Mental Health of the State of California.   As Principal Investigator, she conducted research from 1999-2004 on the “Subjective Experience of Atypical Antipsychotics and the Culture of Recovery” (National Institute of Mental Health Grant #R01 MH 60232:  $636,222); “Culture, Mental Health, and Recovery (American Philosophical Society 2004-2005: $60,000); "Socio-cultural Factors and Course of Persistent Mental Illness” (National Institute of Mental Health Grant #MH 47920: $525,953); and during from 1988-1990 “The Mental Health of Central American Refugees” funded by the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression ($60,000).  She has also served as Principal Investigator and Mentor for research funded by the National Institute for Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, for pre-doctoral, post-doctoral, and faculty research and training grants in the social and medical sciences.

Theoretical Approach and Empirical Findings:  Formative and Current

Dr. Jenkins' research trajectory can be traced to her early published works that examine ordinary and extraordinary experiences that define what it means to be human across an array of social and cultural contexts.  Over the course of her career, Professor Jenkins has addressed the enduring question of whether the normal and pathological are discontinuous categories or poles on a continuum, favoring an ontological approach that calls into question explicit and implicit categorical distinctions.  Dr. Jenkins has theorized and empirically examined the significant variation in the course and outcome of illness in relation to socio-emotional response of kin, cultural conceptions of illness, and the subjective experience of medicine and healing.  This research contributes to findings by the World Health Organization of better course and outcome for serious mental illnesses in less industrialized countries as compared to Europe and the United States. 

Dr. Jenkins’ research team was the first to show that low-income Spanish-speaking first-generation Mexican immigrants to the United States had better course of illness than their Euro-American counterparts in relation to family social and emotional response.  While Mexican-American families typically viewed the problem as a common condition called nervios, from which everyone may suffer to a greater or lesser degree, and for which the cultural response incorporates sadness, warmth, and sympathy, low income, Euro-Americas more often regarded the problem as a personality deficit (e.g., ‘laziness’) about which kin often expressed anger and hostility.  These differing cultural conceptions and social responses significantly affect the course and outcome of illness.  This anthropological approach to mental health is important in showing not only cultural variation in the ways in which problems are conceived but also that such conceptions and associated emotional responses make substantial difference for who gets better and who does not.   Along these lines, Dr. Jenkins has theorized what is “inside the black box of ‘expressed emotion’” as researched within the field of cultural psychiatry - (see publication for Jenkins & Karno (1992) "The Meaning of Expressed Emotion: Theoretical Issues Raised by Cross-Cultural Research" Special Article, American Journal of Psychiatry).

Dr. Jenkins has carried out ethnographic studies of violence and warfare and explored what she has termed the “political ethos” – defined as culturally organized feeling and sentiment pertaining to social domains of power and interest – of societies besieged by violence, terror, and torture. - (see " The State Construction of Affect: Political Ethos and Mental health among Salvadoran Refugees.” Culture, Medicine, Psychiatry 1991; Jenkins 2015).  These studies have been aimed at theorizing the nexus among the role of the nation-state in constructing a political ethos, discourses about affect, and cultural phenomenology and the mental health consequences of those who dwell in that ethos. Dr. Jenkins and her colleagues have identified culturally specific bodily transactions of emotions and embodiment of trauma such as the sensation of intense heat in the body - (see Jenkins & Valiente 1994 - "Bodily transactions of the passions: el calor among Salvadoran women refugees.).  Not only are such phenomena central to mind-body problems, they are also of clinical significance insofar as they may be misdiagnosed as, for example, menopause, psychosis, or high blood pressure.                                

Book Project: 

Professor Jenkins recently published a book:  Extraordinary Conditions: Culture and Experience in Mental Illness.  This monograph covers studies from three different NIMH RO1 awards for research on the lived experience of culture and psychosis, psychopharmacology, refugee and immigrant mental health, and Jenkins’ theoretical formulation of “extraordinary conditions” as reciprocally produced subjective experience and institutional structures.  (See also Publications for Links & Reviews)

Research Projects:

“Cultural Perceptions and Practices Surrounding Adolescent Mental Health in Northern Mexico,” Principal Investigator

In this study, our interdisciplinary team is currently collecting data to identify cultural conceptions of mental health and patterns of help-seeking in the northern Mexico region.  The research seeks an empirical understanding of contemporary knowledge and practices surrounding emotional distress and behaviors regarded as problematic.  Working with parents, teachers, and service providers, we are investigating (1) the conceptualization of wellbeing and the identification of problems of emotional/mental health; (2) decision-making for help-seeking services; and (3) the socio-emotional features that contribute to vulnerability and resilience in processes of recovery.   Analysis of the ethnographic data thus far suggests that adolescents struggle with everyday violence and hardship and that can be associated with feelings of loneliness, social isolation, and moderate levels of depression.

(See publication Olivas, D'Urso, and Jenkins, 2017c)

This project is an NIMH-funded (RO1 MH071781) study entitled “Southwest Youth and the Experience of Psychiatric Treatment” (SWYEPT). Dr. Jenkins conducted collaborative research with an interdisciplinary team (anthropologists, psychiatrists, psychologists). The study examines psychological distress, cultural meaning/dissonance, and structural violence among adolescents who are placed in residential psychiatric treatment facilities. Also studied are a comparison group of adolescents, who according to research diagnostic criteria do not have symptoms of mental illness.  The study was carried out with a multiethnic population (Latino/Hispanic, Native American, Anglo/Euro-American) utilizing a research protocol that is longitudinal and spans a wide geographical area, following participants after hospital discharge into a range of social settings including other psychiatric facilities, kin-based homes, foster care homes, schools, and neighborhoods.  Methods of study combine ethnographic interviews and observations, psychiatric diagnostic interviews, informal and unstructured interactions over time and across a range of social settings.

The goal of the study is to produce anthropological knowledge of broad use to those concerned with culture and lived experience, social conflict, mental health services, and an informed public policy that affects the lives of youths through institutions of care, containment, or social abandonment.  The study is intended to shed empirical light on the often-neglected sites of poor American communities that are ravaged by the violence of poverty and the economic consequences of the Great Recession, institutional and familial neglect, gang activity and substance abuse. A major concern is to identify what strategies youths create to elude such circumstances and under what conditions they succumb to these circumstances. Institutional and everyday neoliberal discourse on “personal responsibility” is analyzed in a context of choosing short-term psychiatric facilities as preferable to incarceration in prisons/detention centers. The problem of uncontrollable rage, and what can at times appear as heroic familial struggles to “contain” such powerful affects, has emerged as a central problem for the development of social, cultural, and political theorizing of youth culture and life worlds.

In addition to publications (Jenkins and Stone, 2017b; Jenkins, 2015a; Jenkins and Haas, 2015b; Jenkins, 2015c), Dr. Jenkins is working on a co-authored ethnographic monograph on adolescent mental health, entitled Troubled in the Land of Enchantment for publication with the University of California Press. 

Residency at Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center for 2021 

Professors Janis Jenkins and Thomas Csordas from the Department of Anthropology completed their Academic Writing Residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s renowned Bellagio Center in Italy during August and September.  This highly competitive four-week residency supports the production of important new knowledge addressing some of the most complex challenges facing our world, and innovative works of art that enhance our understanding of pressing global and social issues and encourage positive action.  The award is made to applicants who have demonstrated decades of significant professional contributions to their field aligning with the Rockefeller Foundation’s efforts to promote the well-being of humanity, particularly through issues that have a direct impact on the lives of socially and economically disadvantaged populations around the world.  Jenkins and Csordas were part of the first cohort of interdisciplinary scholars to reopen the Bellagio Center following an 18-month closure due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Residency provided them time and space to write about material from their collaborative NIMH funded project “Southwest Youth and the Experience of Psychiatric Treatment,” which comparatively examines the experience of adolescents in New Mexico hospitalized for psychiatric disorders and those who have not been diagnosed or treated for mental illness.  The challenge of their ongoing project is to understand the lived experience of adolescents in a multicultural and under-resourced region, with emphasis on their trajectories through the mental health treatment system and their hopes for having a life in the face of precarity and affliction.  The project is interdisciplinary, linking anthropology, psychiatry, and clinical psychology at their point of intersection in the topic of adolescent mental health. One goal is to produce knowledge of imminent value to policy makers and clinicians who treat troubled youth or who are responsible for developing treatment programs, particularly in settings where cultural differences and social obstacles to treatment access come into play.

Books

2020   Jenkins, Janis H. and Thomas J. Csordas. Troubled in the Land of Enchantment:  Adolescent Experience of Psychiatric Treatment.  Oakland:  University of California Press.

• https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520343528/troubled-in-the-land-of-enchantment
  Order online and save 30%. Use source code 17M6662 at checkout

 2015     Jenkins, Janis H.  Extraordinary Conditions: Culture and Experience in Mental Health.  University of California Press.

• http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520287112

. 

Book Reviews

2020    ILHA Revista de Anthropologia 22(1): 234-241
             For the Portuguese version, click here

2018    L’Homme. Revue française d’anthropologie (Vol. 225): 223-225

2017    Somatosphere Science. Medicine, and Anthropology Collaborative Website

2017    Medical Anthropology Quarterly 31(4)

2016    Ethos: J Society Psychological Anthropology 44(4): 23-e25

2016    American Anthropologist: American Anthropological Association

2016    CHOICE Connect: "This extraordinary book will be relevant to all who are interested in medical anthropology, psychiatry, and health studies. . . . Highly recommended" (as excerpted on U of California website)

2015   Online Interview -  Classical 89.org - Radio program "Thinking Aloud" listed as follows: "In her new book Extraordinary Conditions: Culture and Experience in Mental Illness, medical anthropologist Janis H. Jenkins explores a little-known aspect of mental illness: that its onset, manifestation, diagnosis, and cure are all filtered through the
lens of culture.  In other words, the same biological illness looks and acts differently depending on the cultural context in which it occurs. This is a perspective primarily available via the tools of medical anthropology and Jenkins is here to discuss her research on this topic. BYU Broadcasts.

 2011     Jenkins, Janis H. Introduction. (Pharmaceutical Self) and Chapter 1:  Pharmaceutical Self and Imaginary in the Social Field of Psychiatric Treatment. In Pharmaceutical Self: The Global Shaping of Experience in an Age of Psychopharmacology. School of Advanced Research Press; pgs. 3-16. & pgs. 17-40.

• http://www.amazon.com/dp/1934691380/?tag=mh0b-20&hvadid=4162341028&hvqmt=p&hvbmt=bp&hvdev=c&ref=pd_sl_3rnxmdjc0m_p

Book Reviews

2014    Medical Anthropology Quarterly 28(1): b35-b37   

2013    Transcultural Psychiatry 50(4): 599–604

2004     Jenkins, Janis H. and Robert J. Barrett. Schizophrenia, Culture, and Subjectivity: The Edge of Experience. Janis H. Jenkins and Robert J. Barrett, Eds. Cambridge University Press

• http://www.amazon.com/Schizophrenia-Culture-Subjectivity-Experience-Anthropology/dp/0521829550

Book Reviews

2009     Transcultural Psychiatry 46(1)

2005     Psychiatric Services

2004     Disability Studies Quarterly 24(4)

Primary Published

2023     Jenkins, Janis H.  Intimate and Social Spheres of Mental Illness. In Arc of Interference: Medical Anthropology for Worlds on Edge, Joao Biehl and Vincanne Adams, Eds. pp. 133-160, Duke University Press.

2022     Jenkins, Janis H., Giselle Sanchez, Eric Miller, Nadia Santillanes, Grace Urano and Alexandra Pryor. Depression and anxiety among multiethnic middle school students: Age, gender, and sociocultural environment. International journal of social psychiatry 0(0) 1-11.

2020     Jenkins, Janis H. and Thomas J. Csordas.  Troubled in the Land of Enchantment:  Adolescent Experience of Psychiatric Treatment. University of California Press.

2020     Jenkins, Janis H. Giselle Sanchez, and Olga Olivas. Loneliness, adolescence, and global mental health: Soledad and structural violence in Mexico. Transcultural Society 57(5):673–687

2019     Claudia Rafful, María Elena Medina-Mora, Patricia González-Zúñiga, Janis H. Jenkins, M. Gudelia Rangel,  Steffanie A. Strathdee & Peter J. Davidson. "Somebody Is Gonna Be Hurt": Involuntary Drug Treatment in Mexico, Medical Anthropology 1-15.

2018      Thomas Csordas and Janis H. Jenkins. Living with a Thousand Cuts: Self-Cutting, Agency, and Mental Illness among Adolescents. Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 46(2): 206-229.

2018      Jenkins, Janis H. Anthropology and Psychiatry: A Contemporary Convergence for Global Mental Health. In Textbook of Cultural Psychiatry, Second Edition. Dinesh Bhugra and Kamaldeep Bhui, Eds. Cambridge University Press.

2017     Ellen E. Kozelka and Janis H. Jenkins. Renaming Non-Communicable Diseases. Correspondence, The Lancet 5:e655.

2017     Jenkins, Janis H., and Annika Stone. Global Mental Health and Adolescent Anxiety: Kin, Care and Struggle in New Mexico. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 1-21.

2017     Olga Olivas, Sol D'Urso, and Janis H. Jenkins. Adolescence and Global Mental Health: Cultural Perceptions of Emotional Wellbeing in Tijuana, Mexico. Neos 9(1): 5-7. Publication of the Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group.

2017     Janis H. Jenkins and Ellen E. Kozelka. Global Mental Health and Psychopharmacology in Precarious Ecologies: Anthropological Considerations for Engagement and Efficacy. In The Palgrave Handbook of Sociocultural Perspectives on Global Mental Health. Ross White, Ursula Read, Sumeet Jain, David Orr, Eds. Palgrave Press. pgs. 151-168

2017    Janis H. Jenkins et al. “Somebody Is Gonna Be Hurt”: Involuntary Drug Treatment in Mexico. Medical Anthropology. pgs. 1545-5882

Click here for more

Professor Jenkins was awarded the 1990 Stirling Prize by the Society for Psychological Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association. Dr. Jenkins is the recipient of an award from the Russell Sage Foundation (1997) to convene an international conference that resulted in the volume Schizophrenia, Culture, and Subjectivity: The Edge of Experience, Jenkins, Janis H. and Barrett, Robert, J. Editors. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2004). She was also awarded funding from the School for Advanced Research (2007) for an Advanced Seminar on culture and mental health that led to publication in 2011 of Pharmaceutical Self: The Global Shaping of Experience in an Age of Psychopharmacology.

At UC San Diego, Professor Jenkins is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Psychiatry. She teaches graduate students, undergraduate students, and psychiatry residents. Her courses focus on a variety of aspects of global health and cultural diversity, medical and psychological anthropology, mental health, psychopharmacology, emotion, migration, political violence, and mixed-methods (ethnographic, qualitative, and quantitative) approaches to research. Professor Jenkins serves actively as a faculty Committee Member for numerous doctoral dissertation committees, and as Chair for doctoral training in topics specifically within the fields of medical and psychological anthropology that include mental health in China (Dr. Hua Wu, 2021) and Mexico (Dr. Ellen Kozelka, 2020 and Dr. Whitney Duncan, 2011), lived experience of political asylum-seeking among African migrants (Dr. Bridget Haas, 2012); subjective well-being in Colombia (Dr. Jessica Novak, 2014), lived experience and “risky subjectivity” among HIV+ men (Dr. Fred Bloom, 1996, Dr. Ted Gideonse, Ph.D 2012), Black/African-American, Latinx, Euro-American children and families living with conditions diagnosed as behavioral and emotional disorders (Dr. Elizabeth Carpenter-Song, 2007), self-identity and acquisition of cultural knowledge (Dr. Jacklyn Chisholm, 2002). 

Professor Jenkins is the Director of the Center for Global Mental Health at UC San Diego. She is also core faculty for the undergraduate major in Global Health for the Global Health Program in tandem with the UC San Diego campus-wide Global Health Initiative. In addition, Dr. Jenkins supervises global health students participating in the UC San Diego Blum Cross-Border Initiative and serves on the Advisory Board of the UC San Diego Center on Global Justice. She is the President of the American Anthropological Association's Society for Psychological Anthropology.