Psychiatric Encounters

Madness and Modernity in Yucatan, Mexico

By Beatriz M. Reyes-Foster

SERIES: Medical Anthropology

Rutgers University Press

Psychiatric Encounters presents an intimate portrait of a public inpatient psychiatric facility in the Southeastern state of Yucatan, Mexico. The book explores the experiences of patients and psychiatrists as they navigate the challenges of public psychiatric care in Mexico. While international reports condemning conditions in Mexican psychiatric institutions abound, Psychiatric Encounters considers the large- and small-scale obstacles to quality care encountered by doctors and patients alike as they struggle to live and act like human beings under inhumane conditions. Beatriz Mireya Reyes-Foster closely examines the impact of the Mexican state’s neoliberal health reforms on how patients access care and doctors perform their duties. Engaging with madness, modernity, and identity, Psychiatric Encounters considers the enduring role of colonialism in the context of Mexico's troubled contemporary mental health care institutions.

This ethnography of a single psychiatric hospital broadens into a trenchant critique of the persistence of colonial structures in the Mexican state and the psyche of its citizens. Reyes-Foster analyzes intimate clinical encounters through a double optic: Mexico’s neoliberal political economy and its ambivalent modernization. The book is ultimately a tragic story of how subjective, institutional and national fractures all mirror each other. But its intellectual breadth–from Fanon to Foucault to contemporary indigenous anthropology–charts a new course for the cultural study of psychiatry. Paul E. Brodwin, author of Everyday Ethics: Voices from the Front Lines of Community Psychiatry

A bold and original study of a mental asylum in Mexico. Theoretically innovative and ethnographically rich, Reyes-Foster links discourses and experiences of coloniality, madness and modernity in creative, important ways. Angela Garcia, author of The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande

Recommended. Choice

A welcome intervention to psychiatric anthropology as well as to the field of global mental health. Medical Anthropology Quarterly

The clear strength of Psychiatric Encounters lies in its complex yet compelling account of how relations of power shaping contemporary psychiatric practice are products of Mexico's troublesome histories of coloniality and neoliberal modernity. American Anthropologist

This ethnography of a single psychiatric hospital broadens into a trenchant critique of the persistence of colonial structures in the Mexican state and the psyche of its citizens. Reyes-Foster analyzes intimate clinical encounters through a double optic: Mexico’s neoliberal political economy and its ambivalent modernization. The book is ultimately a tragic story of how subjective, institutional and national fractures all mirror each other. But its intellectual breadth–from Fanon to Foucault to contemporary indigenous anthropology–charts a new course for the cultural study of psychiatry. Paul E. Brodwin, author of Everyday Ethics: Voices from the Front Lines of Community Psychiatry

A bold and original study of a mental asylum in Mexico. Theoretically innovative and ethnographically rich, Reyes-Foster links discourses and experiences of coloniality, madness and modernity in creative, important ways. Angela Garcia, author of The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande

Recommended. Choice

A welcome intervention to psychiatric anthropology as well as to the field of global mental health. Medical Anthropology Quarterly

The clear strength of Psychiatric Encounters lies in its complex yet compelling account of how relations of power shaping contemporary psychiatric practice are products of Mexico's troublesome histories of coloniality and neoliberal modernity. American Anthropologist

Beatriz Mireya Reyes-Foster is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Note on Text
Foreword
1          Introduction: Las Lomas at the Threshold of Modernity
2          Coloniality, La Zona del Estar, and Yucatan’s Maya Heritage
3          Making the Matrix
4          Modernity: Problem and Promise of Mexican Psychiatry
5          Psychiatric Encounters
6          In the Heart of Madness
7          Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

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