{"title":"The Moral Blind Spots of Evidence-Based Psychiatry: Learning from Britain's Trial of \"Peer-Supported Open Dialogue\".","authors":"Liana Chase, David Mosse","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2025.2563253","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2025.2563253","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Open Dialogue is a rights-based approach to psychiatric crisis response with growing global uptake. Over the last five years, it has been subject to a large-scale randomized controlled trial (RCT) within the UK's National Health Service. While the trial researchers have emphasized the need for more evidence to inform policy, many practitioners involved in the trial have been lobbying for Open Dialogue's immediate rollout across the country. Drawing on 24 months of clinical ethnography, we suggest this tension reveals moral dimensions of mental health care that are not adequately accounted for in evidence-based psychiatry.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"1-14"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-09-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145132145","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Public Understanding of Gut Health and the Human Microbiome in the USA: An Exploratory Study.","authors":"Mark Nichter","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2025.2558836","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2025.2558836","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>At a time of rising public interest in the human microbiome and calls for increased microbe literacy in public health, few studies have explored how different segments of the US public understand gut health. To address this gap, An exploratory ethnographic study was conducted in Southern Arizona. The study identified five themes that encompass Pasteurian militaristic and post-Pasteurian ecological perceptions of gut health, gut adaptability, and probiotic/antibiotic influence on\" natural immunity.\" Future microbe literacy programs will need to engage with local ideas about gut health, build upon points of convergence with bioscience, and identify points of divergence that challenge public health initiatives.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"1-15"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145114653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Socialist Derg Regime and Violence Against Kumpal Ethnomedicine in Ethiopia (1970s-80s).","authors":"Desalegn Amsalu","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2025.2563264","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2025.2563264","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The relationship between African governments and ethnomedical practices is marked by policy dilemma and ideological conflicts. Through an ethnographic study spanning 2016-17 and employing \"violence\" as an analytical framework, this article shows how the socialist Derg regime in Ethiopia (1974-1991) devastated ethnomedicinal practice of ethnic Kumpal. The regime persecuted practitioners, accusing them of aiding insurgents with bulletproofing remedies, dismissing their beliefs as feudal remnants, and coercing the community to renounce traditions through oathing. The article presents an uncommon case study of brutal forms of violence by an African socialist regime targeting its own people over their ethnomedical practices.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"1-12"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-09-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145092792","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Governing \"Officials' Heartache\": Aesthetic Attunement, Philosophical Counseling, and Psychomoral Training in China.","authors":"Jie Yang","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2025.2558849","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2025.2558849","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Diverging from care modalities based on psyche, \"Confucianized\" psychomoral training for Chinese officials who suffer from heartache (mental distress and ethical conflicts) emphasizes the heart/<i>xin</i> as the moral core and its affective and aesthetic attunement in achieving harmony. However, the focus on the heart, while valuable in \"indigenizing\" or recasting psychology from Chinese precepts, remains tied to state ideologies. Such training moralizes structural issues that have generated heartache. This dual process of \"indigenization\" and Confucianization highlights contentious roles psychotherapists and moral psychologists play in cultivating a form of therapeutic governance anchored in the heart that straddles party-state and market in the name of care.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"1-14"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-09-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145066097","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Bubble-Bathification of Self-Care: Problematizing Possibilities for Restful Mental Health in Canada.","authors":"Loa Gordon","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2025.2558843","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2025.2558843","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>As radical genres of self-care are co-opted under neoliberal logics, I track an emerging \"bubble-bathification\" of self-care, which foregrounds rest as a therapeutic avenue toward mental health. Fieldwork at Canadian universities demonstrates that the promotion of restful self-care is often juxtaposed against environments of systemic exhaustion, resulting in a cycle of fatigue for students perpetrated by the sources promoting restorative breaks. There is a simultaneous desire among students to divest themselves from inactivity in favor of pursuing justice-oriented change in their communities. I conclude that social, mental, and bodily unrest are mutually constitutive in understanding how exhaustion threatens people's selfhood.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"1-14"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-09-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145024484","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Transcendent Patterning of Medical Pluralism: Religion and Medical Practices Among Miao Migrants in China.","authors":"Shixian Wen, Orlando Woods, Quan Gao","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2025.2545835","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2025.2545835","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Based on ethnographic fieldwork on the medical practices of Miao internal migrants in China, in this article we critique the hierarchical and discrete ontologies of \"pluralism\" prevalent in anthropological studies of medical pluralism. It examines how Miao migrants construct an informal pluralistic medical system that integrates shamanistic ritual healing, herbalism, and \"folk\" biomedicine within a pragmatically grounded yet spiritually coherent framework rooted in Miao religion and cosmologies. Furthermore, we explore how their medical-seeking practices, grounded in a transcendent ontology of well-being, operate through affective economies of trust and <i>renqing</i>, thereby enhancing their medical resilience and socio-economic embeddedness into local society.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"1-16"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-08-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144974088","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"After Antibiotics - Events, Episodes and the Veterinization of UK Livestock.","authors":"Stephen Hinchliffe","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2025.2539760","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2025.2539760","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>As antimicrobial use is more tightly regulated, animal medicine is under pressure. Drawing on UK fieldwork with veterinarians, farmers, and animal health providers, this article examines how animal health practices are being reorganized. It argues that antimicrobial reductions have not driven the systemic changes some predict. Instead, the antibiotic era's legacy persists, shaping preventive efforts and reinforcing data-driven control. As veterinary roles are marginalized, the illusion of mastery over animal life endures. It is an illusion that risks undermining progress on antimicrobial resistance by reinforcing, rather than challenging, dominant forms of biopolitical control.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"1-17"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144761773","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beyond Body Parts: The Uterus as a Symbol of Self in the USA.","authors":"Ophra Leyser-Whalen","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2025.2540527","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2025.2540527","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Utilizing a symbolic interactionist lens in analysis of 16 in-depth interviews with 13 women and three men who had used fertility treatments in the United States, I reveal how the uterus was a powerful symbol for those struggling with infertility as they drew upon cultural norms and co-created meaning through interactions with multiple others. The uterus represented more than a biological body part; it symbolized the cultural power of biomedicine and created biographical disruptions that affected people's self-perceptions as women, mothers, wives, and lovers. Findings further uncover the relationship between science, medicine, culture, and identity and the body.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"1-13"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144733911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Negotiating Identities in the COVID-19 Crisis: The Global-Local Dilemma of Medical Epidemiologists in Taiwan.","authors":"Shao-Hua Liu","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2025.2535997","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2025.2535997","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Taiwan, internationally acclaimed for its early success in COVID-19 control, credits its robust system of medical epidemiologists as pivotal. This article examines how these physicians were caught between the professionalism of global health initiatives and the challenges of local governance in a structurally unequal world. These dynamics shaped their roles as both members of transnational networks upholding professional principles and national scientists representing a state eager for \"global citizenship\"--a vision championed by UN agencies and international organizations. The conflation and disruption of biological citizenship, nationally and globally, together influenced the identity negotiation of Taiwanese medical epidemiologists.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"1-13"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144733912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rethinking the Jewish Womb in Israel.","authors":"Elly Teman, Orit Chorowicz Bar-Am","doi":"10.1080/01459740.2025.2535996","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2025.2535996","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article revisits questions about the womb's role in conferring Jewish identity in Israel. Judaism is transmitted matrilineally, yet orthodox rabbis increasingly view babies from non-Jewish eggs as requiring conversion. Through interviews with 25 orthodox Jewish-Israeli gestational surrogates who see surrogacy as an act of \"loving-kindness\" (chesed), we explore how they navigate halakhic uncertainty surrounding the Jewish status of babies they carry when non-Jewish donor eggs are used. Though the State recognizes their \"Jewish womb\" as determining the baby's religious status, these surrogates resist acknowledging this power because they conceptualize themselves as merely \"hosting\" a child that belongs to others.</p>","PeriodicalId":47460,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology","volume":" ","pages":"1-14"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2025-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144683383","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}