E Mendenhall
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 15741 |
|---|---|
| NOME | E Mendenhall |
| PRENOMES | E |
| SOBRENOME | Mendenhall |
| ASSINATURA | MENDENHALL E |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Georgetown University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5826-1321 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 83 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 302 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 83 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2007 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 11 |
‘Covid kills, and it's not joking around’
The COVID-19 pandemic intensified existing social and gender inequalities, disproportionately affecting Black women living in communities like Soweto, South Africa. This paper primarily draws on qualitative data from 25 in-depth interviews conducted in 2021, complemented by descriptive survey data from 204 women collected between 2020 and 2021. We employed inductive thematic analysis guided by the socio-ecological model to examine how intersectin…
Interembodiment
Special series
Drought, worry, and preparing for the future
The impacts of climate change in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) presents a chronic and intensifying disaster, with drought, flooding, and extreme heat, presenting unique challenges and profound disruptions. Growing evidence links such events to ecological grief, ecological anxiety, and solastalgia – negative affective states that reflects responses to climate change related destruction of nature, species, culturally significant or sacred spaces, and ot…
Ecological grief among farmers and pastoralists in Ethiopia and Kenya
Climate change is a major cause of mental distress worldwide. In many ways, climate change has become a chronic disaster, while in other ways each acute event can accumulate and present challenges within and between communities. A growing body of evidence indicates that a changing climate can precipitate a cluster of negative affective states scholars call “ecological grief.” Ecological grief reflects psychological responses to climate changes an…
Long Covid and the Rise of Digital Patient Activism
HIV patient activism has had a profound influence on the embodied health movements that followed it. Complex chronic conditions—for which there is no verifiable test or clear treatment program—have been called “illnesses you have to fight to get,” in part because patients struggle to convince doctors to take their pain seriously enough to give a diagnosis. This essay puts Long COVID into context with other embodied health movements, highlighting …
Digital activism in Kenya
Digital activism around Long Covid has reverberated around the globe, as patients, researchers, and clinicians worked together to understand the chronic condition. However, Long Covid networks, much like other social networks, have hierarchies and barriers that can impede equitable access. In this article, we examine how the global digital center and periphery shape how people with Long Covid connect to networks to learn about their illness sympt…
Stigma, Chronicity and Complexity of Living with Long Covid in Kenya
Cultural and contextual adaptation of the Solastalgia subscale of the Environmental Distress Scale in drought-affected Kilifi, Kenya
Background There is an urgent need to measure the psychological toll of climate-related ecological degradation and destruction in low- and middle-income countries. However, availability of locally adapted tools is limited. Our objective was to conduct a transcultural translation and cultural adaptation (TTA) of the Solastalgia subscale of the Environmental Distress Scale (EDS-Solastalgia) in Kilifi, Kenya, which is undergoing transformational cha…
Interembodiment among Long Haulers and their carers
Interdisciplinary perspectives on multimorbidity in Africa
Multimorbidity is an emerging challenge for health systems globally. It is commonly defined as the co-occurrence of two or more chronic conditions in one person, but its meaning remains a lively area of academic debate, and the utility of the concept beyond high-income settings is uncertain. This article presents the findings from an interdisciplinary research initiative that drew together 60 academic and applied partners working in 10 African co…
Women ́s experiences of menopause
Women today are experiencing menopause for decades more than in previous generations. This 'change of life' is defined by an entire stage of physical, hormonal, and emotional changes that accompany menstrual irregularity and the cessation of fertility, although limited medical research has focused on it. Yet, the inevitability of menopause is universal for all human females around 50 years old. In this article, we conducted twenty-five 20-60 min …
Planning to Work as an Applied Medical Anthropologist? The Advantages of a Broad and Strategic Methodological Toolkit
Applied medical anthropologists work in a variety of settings. This diversity of career paths is exciting as it allows anthropological theory and method to influence many spheres of society that impact people's everyday lived health. Success in this wide arena requires an inclusive and broad way of thinking about ethnography that incorporates multiple ways of thinking and the ability to employ a range of methodological tools. This short piece pro…
Patients as knowledge partners in the context of complex chronic conditions
This article conveys how taking patient knowledge seriously can improve patient experience and further medical science. In clinical contexts related to infection-associated chronic conditions and other complex chronic illnesses, patient knowledge is often undervalued, even when clinicians have limited training in diagnosing and treating a particular condition. We argue that there are opportunities for clinicians and researchers to collaborate wit…
Water in the West
Framing Long Covid through Patient activism in the United States
Trust, individualism, and the logics of care in middle America during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic
Polarization and turf-wars have characterized the COVID-19 response in the United States. While COVID-19 narratives can be binary and divisive, how people cared for each other throughout the first year of the pandemic is more nuanced. This article describes how and why constructs of fear, individualism, wellbeing, and personal risk-taking became imbued in behaviors that thwarted the risk of the collective. This work is based on informal conversat…
Power, place, and access
Vaccines have played an essential role in curbing case and mortality rates due to SARS-CoV-2 in the United Sates. Still, many communities display high rates of unwillingness or inability to get a COVID-19 vaccine, limiting overall vaccination efforts and contributing to viral spread. Black Americans have expressed skepticism towards vaccines because of limited access to the technology, mistrust in its safety and efficacy, and a lack of confidence…
Flourishing with chronic illness(es) and everyday stress
The pursuit of flourishing, or living a good life, is a common human endeavor with different meanings across individuals and contexts. What is needed is a further exploration of the relationship between flourishing and health, particularly chronic illness, which affects individuals across the life course and is affected by experiences of stress derived from social and structural vulnerability. Drawing on data from the Soweto Syndemics study, incl…
A review of place-related contextual factors in syndemics research
Disentangling opioids-related overdose syndemics
Covid-19, Climate, and Christianity in Rural Northern California
The American political and emotional response to COVID-19 during the first pandemic summer of 2020 revealed a great deal about who we are as a nation: one that is divided and diverse, as well as geographically, racially, and politically complex. Political representation of governors was a powerful indicator of the public health policies during that first year, such as mask mandates. Mask politics have been heralded as a great indicator of politic…
Perceptions and experiences of prostate cancer patients in a public tertiary hospital in urban South Africa
Prostate cancer is among the most prevalent forms of cancer worldwide and is reported to have the highest incidence, mortality, and 5-year prevalence rate of all cancers among men living in Africa. Despite this widespread burden in the African continent, little is known about the perspectives and experience of prostate cancer among African men. To further understand experiences among patients living in urban South Africa, we conducted in-depth, s…
Ethnographic Methods for Identifying Cultural Concepts of Distress
We review ethnographic methods that allow researchers to assess distress in a culturally sensitive manner. We begin with an overview of standardized biomedical and psychological approaches to assessing distress cross-culturally. We then focus on literature describing the development of reliable and valid culturally sensitive assessment tools that can serve as complements or alternatives to biomedical categories and diagnostic frameworks. The meth…
Unmasked
Speaking through Diabetes
The disproportionate prevalence of Type II diabetes mellitus among the poor suggests that, in addition to lifestyle factors, social suffering may be embodied in diabetes. In this article, we examine the role of social distress in narratives collected from 26 Mexican Americans seeking diabetes care at a public hospital in Chicago. By linking social suffering with diabetes causality, we argue that our participants use diabetes much like an "idiom o…
Beyond Comorbidity
This article examines the comorbidity concept in medical anthropology. I argue that the dearth of articles on comorbidity in medical anthropology may result from the rise of syndemic theory. Syndemics recognize how social realities shape individual illness experiences as well as distribution of diseases across populations. I discuss synergistic interactions foundational to the syndemics construct through my research of depression and diabetes com…
Applying Syndemics and Chronicity
Medical anthropologists working with global health agendas must develop transdisciplinary frameworks to communicate their work. This article explores two similar but underutilized theoretical frameworks in medical anthropology, and discusses how they facilitate new insights about the relationships between epidemiological patterns and individual-level illness experiences. Two cases from our fieldwork in New Delhi and Chicago are presented to illus…
Self-care and Subjectivity among Mexican Diabetes Patients in the United States
Type 2 diabetes is considered a public health crisis, particularly among people of Mexican descent in the United States. Clinical approaches to diabetes management increasingly emphasize self-care, which places responsibility for illness on individuals and mandates self-regulation. Using narrative and free-list data from a two-phase study of low-income first- and second-generation Mexican immigrants living with diabetes, we present evidence that …
Stress, diabetes, and infection
Idioms of resilience among cancer patients in urban South Africa
Despite the large body of research on idioms of distress in anthropology and transcultural psychiatry, few scholars have examined the concepts that people use to describe social and psychological resilience. The experience of social and psychological resilience is embedded in and shaped by social, political, and economic contexts-much like the factors that shape idioms of distress. As resilience literature more broadly has adopted a socio-ecologi…
Acceptability and feasibility of using non-specialist health workers to deliver mental health care
Three-quarters of the global mental health burden exists in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), yet the lack of mental health services in resource-poor settings is striking. Task-sharing (also, task-shifting), where mental health care is provided by non-specialists, has been proposed to improve access to mental health care in LMICs. This multi-site qualitative study investigates the acceptability and feasibility of task-sharing mental healt…
An ethnopsychology of idioms of distress in urban Kenya
Idioms of distress have become a central construct of anthropologists who aspire to understand the languages that individuals of certain sociocultural groups use to express suffering, pain, or illness. Yet, such idioms are never removed from global flows of ideas within biomedicine that influence how cultural idioms are conceived, understood, and expressed. This article proposes a preliminary model of ethnopsychology described by urban Kenyans, w…
Stress and diabetes in socioeconomic context
On symbols and scripts
The COVID-19 crisis emerged during a divisive time in American politics. We argue that to unravel the American COVID-19 crisis-and to craft effective responses-we need a more sophisticated understanding of the political culture of public health crises. We use data from interviews and online media to examine symbolic representation of public health phenomena (masks; public health institutions) within the first months of the US epidemic. We show ho…
A spectrum of (Dis)Belief
Syndemic theory, methods, and data
Comorbid Suffering
Cycles of chronic illness are unpredictable, especially when multiple conditions are involved, and that instability can transform "normal" everyday life for individuals and their families. This article employs a theory of "comorbid suffering" to interpret how multiple concurrent diagnoses produce webs of remarkable suffering. We collected 50 life stories from breast cancer survivors enrolled in the South Africa Breast Cancer Study. We present thr…
Syndemic Suffering in Soweto
This article examines the roles of structural and interpersonal violence in individual experiences of health transition in South Africa, focusing on women's narratives of distress and diabetes as well as epidemiology. Over the past decade marked increases in noncommunicable diseases, including type 2 diabetes, have transitioned in South Africa to afflict those who concurrently face great mental health burdens and the world's largest HIV and AIDS …
When Diabetes Confronts HIV
This article investigates how international donor policies cultivate a form of biological sub-citizenship for those with diabetes in Kenya. We interviewed 100 patients at a public hospital clinic in Nairobi, half with a diabetes diagnosis. We focus on three vignettes that illustrate how our study participants differentially perceived and experienced living with and seeking treatment and care for diabetes compared to other conditions, with a speci…
Cancer, chemotherapy, and HIV
Wasting away
Framing Long Covid through Patient activism in the United States
Ethnographic Methods for Identifying Cultural Concepts of Distress
We review ethnographic methods that allow researchers to assess distress in a culturally sensitive manner. We begin with an overview of standardized biomedical and psychological approaches to assessing distress cross-culturally. We then focus on literature describing the development of reliable and valid culturally sensitive assessment tools that can serve as complements or alternatives to biomedical categories and diagnostic frameworks. The meth…
Trust, individualism, and the logics of care in middle America during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic
Polarization and turf-wars have characterized the COVID-19 response in the United States. While COVID-19 narratives can be binary and divisive, how people cared for each other throughout the first year of the pandemic is more nuanced. This article describes how and why constructs of fear, individualism, wellbeing, and personal risk-taking became imbued in behaviors that thwarted the risk of the collective. This work is based on informal conversat…
Syndemic thinking in large-scale studies
Drinking Too Much, Fighting Too Much”
The intersecting issues of intimate partner violence (IPV) and alcohol abuse in South Africa are often characterized as "disasters." Ethnographic research among women in Soweto demonstrates the different manifestations of IPV, perceptions of abuse, and coping mechanisms to manage harmful domestic relationships. Findings suggest a consistent relationship between excessive drinking patterns and IPV-most significantly, physical and emotional abuse-w…
Metabolic Reflections
A mixed-methods, population-based study of a syndemic in Soweto, South Africa
Development and validation of the Soweto Stress Scale
Property grabbing and will writing in Lusaka, Zambia
High rates of HIV and poverty place women in a precarious economic situation in Lusaka, Zambia. Mortality from HIV infection is high, leaving many households single headed and creating almost a half a million orphans. One of the most prevalent forms of gender violence that creates poverty in women is when the male's family claims the property of the deceased from the widow and the children. The Zambia-Emory HIV Research Project collected 184 will…
The influence of motivational messages on future planning behaviors among HIV concordant positive and discordant couples in Lusaka, Zambia
In Zambia the HIV/AIDS epidemic has resulted in many single female-headed households. Strong patriarchal laws and customs prevent widows and children from maintaining economic assets. This study examines the impact of a video-based motivational intervention promoting future planning in 1,504 HIV-infected couples in Lusaka, Zambia. Following a group video session, couples randomized to the motivational arm could choose to write a will, identify a …
Speaking through Diabetes
The disproportionate prevalence of Type II diabetes mellitus among the poor suggests that, in addition to lifestyle factors, social suffering may be embodied in diabetes. In this article, we examine the role of social distress in narratives collected from 26 Mexican Americans seeking diabetes care at a public hospital in Chicago. By linking social suffering with diabetes causality, we argue that our participants use diabetes much like an "idiom o…
Interpersonal Abuse and Depression Among Mexican Immigrant Women with Type 2 Diabetes
Susto, Coraje, and Abuse
Stress and diabetes in socioeconomic context
Reorienting women's health in low- and middle-income countries
Women's health in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) has historically focused on sexual and reproductive health. However, understanding how women acquire, experience, and treat non-reproductive health conditions, such as non-communicable diseases, has become a fundamental public health concern. Special attention to the social determinants of LMIC women's health can provide socially and culturally relevant knowledge for implementation of pol…
Acceptability and feasibility of using non-specialist health workers to deliver mental health care
Three-quarters of the global mental health burden exists in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), yet the lack of mental health services in resource-poor settings is striking. Task-sharing (also, task-shifting), where mental health care is provided by non-specialists, has been proposed to improve access to mental health care in LMICs. This multi-site qualitative study investigates the acceptability and feasibility of task-sharing mental healt…
Syndemic Suffering in Soweto
This article examines the roles of structural and interpersonal violence in individual experiences of health transition in South Africa, focusing on women's narratives of distress and diabetes as well as epidemiology. Over the past decade marked increases in noncommunicable diseases, including type 2 diabetes, have transitioned in South Africa to afflict those who concurrently face great mental health burdens and the world's largest HIV and AIDS …
Applying Syndemics and Chronicity
Medical anthropologists working with global health agendas must develop transdisciplinary frameworks to communicate their work. This article explores two similar but underutilized theoretical frameworks in medical anthropology, and discusses how they facilitate new insights about the relationships between epidemiological patterns and individual-level illness experiences. Two cases from our fieldwork in New Delhi and Chicago are presented to illus…
When HIV is ordinary and diabetes new
Escalation of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) among urban South African populations disproportionately afflicted by HIV/AIDS presents not only medical challenges but also new ways in which people understand and experience sickness. In Soweto, the psychological imprints of political violence of the Apartheid era and structural violence of HIV/AIDS have shaped social and health discourses. Yet, as NCDs increasingly become part of social and biomed…
Diabetes care among urban women in Soweto, South Africa
Effective diabetes education and management in the clinical setting will require systematic changes to healthcare. Inconsistencies across public and private health systems with regards to diabetes counseling, drug availability, quality of care, and patient wait times indicate patients will forego a clinical visit in lieu of diabetes self-care. For example, structural barriers in the public health system undermine medication adherence. With a stro…
Stress, diabetes, and infection
Beyond Co-Morbidity
Self-care and Subjectivity among Mexican Diabetes Patients in the United States
Type 2 diabetes is considered a public health crisis, particularly among people of Mexican descent in the United States. Clinical approaches to diabetes management increasingly emphasize self-care, which places responsibility for illness on individuals and mandates self-regulation. Using narrative and free-list data from a two-phase study of low-income first- and second-generation Mexican immigrants living with diabetes, we present evidence that …
Utilization of Standardized Mental Health Assessments in Anthropological Research
Nurses’ perceptions of mental healthcare in primary-care settings in Kenya
Kenya maintains an extraordinary treatment gap for mental health services because the need for and availability of mental health services are extraordinarily misaligned. One way to narrow the treatment gap is task-sharing, where specialists rationally distribute tasks across the health system, with many responsibilities falling upon frontline health workers, including nurses. Yet, little is known about how nurses perceive task-sharing mental heal…
Nurses’ perceptions of universal health coverage and its implications for the Kenyan health sector
Universal health coverage, comprehensive access to affordable and quality health services, is a key component of the newly adopted 2015 Sustainable Development Goals. Prior to the UN resolution, several countries began incorporating elements of universal health coverage into their domestic policy arenas. In 2013, the newly elected President of Kenya announced initiatives aimed at moving towards universal health coverage, which have proven to be c…
Beyond Comorbidity
This article examines the comorbidity concept in medical anthropology. I argue that the dearth of articles on comorbidity in medical anthropology may result from the rise of syndemic theory. Syndemics recognize how social realities shape individual illness experiences as well as distribution of diseases across populations. I discuss synergistic interactions foundational to the syndemics construct through my research of depression and diabetes com…
Normalizing diabetes in Delhi
The Type 2 diabetes epidemic in India poses challenges to the health system. Yet little is known about how urban Indians view treatment and self-care. Such views are important within the pluralistic healthcare landscape of India, bringing together allopathic and non-allopathic (or traditional) paradigms and practices. We used in-depth qualitative interviews to examine how people living with diabetes in India selectively engage with allopathic and…
Non-communicable disease syndemics
Syndemics
Co-occurring epidemics, syndemics, and population health
Syndemics and the biosocial conception of health
The Georgetown symposium on global mental health
Georgetown University hosted a one-day symposium, ‘Global Mental Health: Transdisciplinary Perspectives’ on 17 April 2016. This meeting followed four days of intensive meetings on global mental hea
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