Janis H. Jenkins

Dr. Janis Jenkins is a psychological and medical anthropologist. While her primary appointment is within the Anthropology Department, she is also on faculty in the Department of Psychiatry. Her principal interests concern culture theory and subjectivity in relation to the self, emotion, gender, violence, resilience, mental health, and psychopharmacology. Her research has been with Mexican immigrants, Salvadoran refugees, Euro-American, Hispanic and other populations in North America. Her published work has highlighted human experience as usefully conceived on a continuum that ranges across ordinary and extraordinary human processes. She has been Principal Investigator for a series of studies funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. Currently, her NIMH-sponsored fieldwork is being carried out in the U.S. Southwest with adolescents hospitalized in psychiatric facilities who later return to live in the local community. She is also working on an edited volume that is the product of an Advanced Seminar she organized and chaired in fall 2007 for the School for Advanced Research: “Self and Imaginary: Anthropological Studies of Psychopharmacology and Globalization.”

Selected Publications

1988 J. H. Jenkins. Ethnopsychiatric Interpretations of Schizophrenic Illness: The Problem of Nervios within Mexican-American Families. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 12:303-331.

1991 J. H. Jenkins, A. Kleinman, and B. J. Good. Cross-Cultural Aspects of Depression. In J. Becker and A. Kleinman, (eds.), Advances in Affective Disorders: Theory and Research, Volume I. Psychosocial Aspects. Erlbaum Press, pgs. 67-99. .

1991 The State Construction of Affect: Political Ethos and Mental Health among Salvadoran Refugees. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 15:139-165.

1991 J. H. Jenkins. The 1990 Stirling Award Essay. Anthropology, Expressed Emotion, and Schizophrenia. Ethos: The Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 19:387-431.

1992 J. H. Jenkins and M. Karno. The Meaning of "Expressed Emotion:" Theoretical Issues Raised by Cross-Cultural Research. Special Article in American Journal of Psychiatry 149: 9-21.

1994 J.H. Jenkins. Culture, Emotion, and Psychopathology. In Emotion and Culture: Empirical Studies of Mutual Influence. S. Kitayama and H. Markus, (Eds.), American Psychological Association Press, pgs. 307-335.

1994 J.H. Jenkins and M. Valiente. Bodily Transactions of the Passions: El Calor (The Heat) among Salvadoran Women. In Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. T. Csordas, (Ed.), Cambridge University Press, pgs. 163-182.

1994 J.H. Jenkins. The Psychocultural Study of Emotion and Mental Disorder. In Handbook of Psychological Anthropology, P. Bock, (Ed.). Greenwood Publishers, pgs. 97-120.

1995 J.H. Jenkins, M. Warren, M.Strauss, F. Bloom, C. Jacobson, and A. Frasca. Sociocultural Dimensions of "Family Burden:" The Specificity of Ethnic, Gender and Diagnostic Effects. Schizophrenia Research 15(1-2):217.

1996 J.H. Jenkins. Culture, Emotion, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In Ethnocultural Aspects of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. A. Marsella and N. Freedman, Eds., Washington D.C.: American Psychological Association Press, pgs. 165-182.

1996 J.H. Jenkins. The Impress of Extremity: Women's Experience of Trauma and Political Violence. In Gender and Health: An International Perspective. Carolyn Sargent and Caroline Brettel, Eds. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, pgs. 278-291.

1996 J. H. Jenkins. Culture, Emotion and Psychiatric Disorder. Revised edition of Medical Anthropology: Contemporary Theory and Method, T. Johnson and C. Sargent, Eds., New York: Praeger Press, pgs. 71-87.

1997 J.H. Jenkins. Subjective experience of persistent schizophrenia and depression among U.S. Latinos and Euro-Americans. British Journal of Psychiatry 170:20- 25.

1998 J.H. Jenkins. The Medical Anthropology of Political Violence: A Cultural and Feminist Agenda. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 12:122-131.

1998 J.H. Jenkins and N. Cofresi. The Sociosomatic Course of Depression and Trauma: A Cultural Analysis of Suffering and Resilience in the Life of a Puerto Rican Woman. Psychosomatic Medicine 60:439-447.

1998 J.H. Jenkins. Diagnostic Criteria for Schizophrenia and Related Psychotic Disorders: Integration and Suppression of Cultural Evidence in DSM-IV. Transcultural Psychiatry 35:357-376.

1999 J.H. Jenkins, Schumacher, J. Family burden of schizophrenia and depressive illness: Specifying the effects ofethnicity, gender andsocial ecology. British Journal of Psychiatry 174:31-38.

2002 Nasser, L., Walders, N., and J. H. Jenkins. The experience of schizophrenia: what's gender got to do with it? A critical review of the current status of research on schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Bulletin 28:351-362.

2004 Jenkins, J.H. Schizophrenia as a Fundamental Human Process. In Schizophrenia, Culture, and Subjectivity: The Edge of Experience. J.H. Jenkins and R.J. Barrett, Eds. Cambridge University Press, pgs. 1-25.

2004. Jenkins, J.H. and Robert J. Barrett. Introduction. Schizophrenia, Culture, and Subjectivity: The Edge of Experience. J.H. Jenkins and R.J. Barrett, Eds. Cambridge University Press, pgs. 29-61.

2005 Jenkins, J.H., Strauss, M.E., Carpenter, E., Miller, D., Floersch, J., Sajatovic, M. Subjective Experience of Recovery from Schizophrenia with Atypical Antipsychotic Medications. International Journal of Social Psychiatry 51(3):211-227.

2005 Jenkins, J.H., Carpenter-Song, E. The New Paradigm of Recovery from Schizophrenia: Cultural Conundrums of Improvement without Cure. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 29(4):379-413.

2007. Jenkins, Janis H., Hollifield, Michael A. Postcoloniality as the Aftermath of Terror between Vietnamese Refugees. In Postcolonial Disorders. Good, M.J.D, Hyde, S.T., Pinto, S., and B.J. Good, Eds. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

2007 Jenkins, Janis H. Anthropology and Psychiatry: The Contemporary Convergence in Textbook of Cultural Psychiatry. Bhugra, Dinesh and Kamaldeep Bhui., Editors. Cambridge University Press.