Citation

Cohen A. Cult. Med. Psychiatry 2001; 25(3): 277-296.

Affiliation

Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2001, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

11680476

Abstract

In the past two decades, the field of psychiatry has seen the once dominant psychoanalytic theories overtaken by biological explanations and approaches to severe mental illness. With this change in perspective, the significance of fantasies and delusions have been reduced to being merely symptoms of psychopathology rather than reflections of human needs and motivations. Using ethnographic evidence from a long-term research project. this paper explores one method by which mentally ill homeless individuals in the Skid Row district of Los Angeles attempted to wrest meaningful lives for themselves out of an environment that featured disaffiliation, violence, boredom, and extreme poverty.

Language: en