Global Mental Health and Adolescent Anxiety: Kin, Care and Struggle in New Mexico

Abstract

While recent developments within the field of global mental health have illuminated the reality of serious mental health difficulties worldwide, particularly in low-income settings, research that focuses on children and adolescents remains underdeveloped. This is especially the case with respect to ethnographic studies of lived experience of adolescents diagnosed with serious mental health conditions. Drawing from an interdisciplinary study of adolescents in New Mexico who were afflicted with a broad range of disorders according to contemporary research diagnostic criteria, this article focuses on anxiety-related conditions with respect to subjective experience and social-ecological contexts of living with such conditions. We offer preliminary observations regarding the value of linking ethnographic and research diagnostic data to address questions of resilience, endurance, capacity and struggle. These observations are intended as the basis for the formulation of more precise hypotheses about adolescent anxiety, kin, and care under conditions of structural violence marked by psychological, residential, and intergenerational adversity.

Teen Perspectives on Suicides and Deaths in an Affluent Community: Perfectionism, Protection, and Exclusion

“…This relatively unique study of teens in an affluent community points to a need for more collective intervention strategies that engage peer groups, parents or family units, and communities as a whole. Important strides have been made in recognizing the multiple levels of factors (e.g., individual, family, community) in teen suicide [8,28,38] and mental health [52]. Community coalitions are considered best practice for suicide containment and to disrupt the emergence of suicide clusters (see, e.g., Hacker et al [7]).…”