About

Dr. Janis H. Jenkins is a psychological/medical anthropologist with expertise on culture and mental health. She received her Ph.D. from UCLA and completed post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School. She has taught at Harvard University, Case Western Reserve University, and UC San Diego, where she is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Psychiatry. She is also on the faculty for the Global Health Program and serves as the Director of the Center for Global Mental Health at UC San Diego. Within the Department of Anthropology, she is a member of the Psychological/Medical Anthropology subfield. Her principal interest is the nexus of human experience, cultural processes, and structural institutions. Dr. Jenkins has directed funded studies on culture, mental health, emotion, treatment and healing, adolescence, refugees, and political ethos, contributing theoretical insights into cultural conceptions of mental illness, socioemotional responses, and the understanding of mental illness as a fundamental human process. Her work emphasizes the importance of 'struggle' over symptoms in illness processes and explores the concept of 'extraordinary conditions' that integrate personal distress with structural adversity such as poverty, racism, misogyny, and social stigma. Her research program involves interdisciplinary studies with diverse populations in the United States and Mexico, including Mexican immigrants, Salvadoran refugees, Puerto Rican migrants, and other Spanish-speaking Latines, as well as Euro-Americans, Native Americans, Vietnamese, and Kurdish groups. Dr. Jenkins has held numerous prestigious appointments, including Visiting Scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, a permanent Member of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, and Distinguished Visiting Faculty at Monash University. She has also served on various editorial boards and provided expertise to the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health. Her scholarly contributions include several books and numerous articles that explore the cultural dimensions of mental health, psychiatric treatment, and the social and political contexts shaping mental illness.

Research topics

• Psychiatry
• Psychology
• Political Science
• Geography
• Philosophy
• Nursing
• History
• Public relations
• Archaeology
• Psychotherapist
• Art
• Medicine
• Environmental ethics

Selected publications

• Orientation and atmosphere: Toward an anthropology of political subjectivity

  Ethos · 2025-09-10

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Political subjectivity is of growing interest within anthropology. In this article, I argue that within any political ethos, the constitution of political subjectivity takes place at the nexus of orientation and atmosphere. In this formulation, orientation defines subjectivity's intentional directionality in terms of value and desire, while atmosphere defines the socioemotional space in which that orientation takes place in terms of power and position. Drawing on research that utilizes an ethnographic, feminist, phenomenological, and psychodynamic approach, the article argues that the concepts of orientation and atmosphere can be leveraged to get a better purchase on understanding political subjectivity. Empirically, I show this across an array of situations, including political violence, incivility, gendered inequity, psychotic affliction, natural disaster, and the development of political awareness. Conceptually, I show that examining processes of self and will, empathy and power, denial and repression at the nexus of orientation and atmosphere can advance the theorization of political subjectivity within psychological anthropology and allied fields.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Social media & subjectivity: Adolescent lived experiences with social media in a Southern California middle school

  Social Science & Medicine · 2024-03-29 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The widespread use of social media (SM) platforms among adolescents has raised concerns over its role in increased adverse physical and mental health conditions. However, current research linking SM use with adolescent health relies on tenuous correlational associations, disproportionately focuses on harmful effects of its use, and seldom examines the perspectives of youth themselves (Odgers and Jensen, 2020; Schønning et al., 2020). This article examines adolescent lived experience in relation to SM platform engagement. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2018-2019 and 2021-2022 among 75 middle-school adolescents living in an ethnically diverse and low-income Southern California community, we examine adolescent subjective experiences with SM platforms that illuminate adolescent concerns during this developmental stage. By attending to adolescent subjectivity, this article reveals the ways in which engagement with SM platforms is inextricable from cultural, social, political, and socio-emotional milieu.

  PublisherDOI

• Intimate and Social Spheres of Mental Illness

  2023-02-27

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 6 Intimate and Social Spheres of Mental Illness

  2023-03-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Conceptions of Mental Illness and Psychopharmaceuticals in Global Health

  Revista de Antropología Social · 2023-11-20 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The field of global health has prioritized the scaling up of services and treatment for mental health in low and middle-income countries. While equitable access to treatments constitutes a priority, the call for urgent action to fill the treatment gap has been advanced largely in the absence of an appeal for ethnographic attention to sociocultural knowledge of conditions and their treatment. This article argues that local knowledge of conceptions of mental illness and psychotropic medication is foundational for an informed understanding of treatment in relation to subjective experience, cultural meaning, and clinical efficacy. These issues are specifically explored in relation to scientific, clinical, and popular discourse surrounding the cultural trope of “chemical imbalance.”

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Depression and anxiety among multiethnic middle school students: Age, gender, and sociocultural environment

  International Journal of Social Psychiatry · 2022-12-18 · 13 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Background: Depression and anxiety-related disorders are common among adolescents. Research attention to early adolescence and low-income ethnically diverse populations is limited. Aim: To conduct screening for depression and anxiety at an early age with attention to gender and socioenvironmental context within a low-income setting. Method: Mixed methods included the PHQ-9A and GAD-10 screening instruments and ethnographic interviews. Results: 75 ethnically diverse middle school students were included. Mean years age was 11.2 (0.74). Females had higher PHQ-9A sum scores than males ( p = .002, Mann-Whitney test) and higher GAD-10 sum scores than males ( p = .016, Mann-Whitney test). After controlling for multiple comparisons, girls had higher mean responses on three PHQ-9A items ( p < .006, two-sided t -test) and only one GAD-10 item ( p < .005, two-sided t -test). Ethnographic interviews revealed contexts associated with girls’ experiences of depression and anxiety, including gender-based violence in both school and home environments. Salient for girls and boys alike were worries about consequences of COVID-19 for family with respect to illness, death, job loss, economic hardship. Fears over student perceptions of intensified discrimination and racism in school and community were prominent. These problems were experienced by students as barriers to educational engagement. Conclusion: Specific attention to early adolescence is needed to identify emergence of subsyndromal conditions which may benefit from therapeutic attention to reduce symptom severity, identify sociocultural, structural, and gender-specific stressors, and to enhance educational engagement.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Advancing Health Equity in Digital Mental Health: Lessons From Medical Anthropology for Global Mental Health

  JMIR Mental Health · 2021 · 20 citations

  • Political Science
  • Psychology
  • Public relations

  Digital health engenders the opportunity to create new effective mental health care models-from substance use recovery to suicide prevention. Anthropological methodologies offer a unique opportunity for the field of global mental health to examine and incorporate contextual mental health needs through attention to the lived experience of illness; engagement with communities; and knowledge of context, structures, and systems. Attending to these diverse mental health needs and conditions as well as the limitations of digital health will allow global mental health researchers, practitioners, and patients to collaboratively create new models for care in the service of equitable, accessible recovery.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Troubled in the Land of Enchantment

  2020-08-07 · 4 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Troubled in the Land of Enchantment: Adolescent Experience of Psychiatric Treatment

  2020 · 42 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychiatry
  • Psychology
  • Psychotherapist
  Publisher

• Troubled in the Land of Enchantment

  University of California Press eBooks · 2020 · 19 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Environmental ethics
  • Geography

  In this groundbreaking study based on five years of in-depth ethnographic and interdisciplinary research, Troubled in the Land of Enchantment explores the well-being of adolescents hospitalized for psychiatric care in New Mexico. Anthropologists Janis H. Jenkins and Thomas J. Csordas present a gripping picture of psychic distress, familial turmoil, and treatment under the regime of managed care that dominates the mental health care system. The authors make the case for the centrality of struggle in the lives of youth across an array of extraordinary conditions, characterized by personal anguish and structural violence. Critical to the analysis is the cultural phenomenology of existence disclosed through shifting narrative accounts by youth and their families as they grapple with psychiatric diagnosis, poverty, misogyny, and stigma in their trajectories through multiple forms of harm and sites of care. Jenkins and Csordas compellingly direct our attention to the conjunction of lived experience, institutional power, and the very possibility of having a life

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R29MH047920

  NIH · $525k · 1996

• NIH Grant R01MH060232

  NIH · $639k · 2004

Frequent coauthors

• Richard Biernacki

  25 shared

• Martha Sajatovic

  Case Western Reserve University

  13 shared

• Robert J. Barrett

  University of Alberta

  11 shared

• Byron J. Good

  Harvard Global Health Institute

  10 shared

• Marvin Karno

  10 shared

• Roknedin Safavi

  10 shared

• Steven R. López

  Northeastern University

  9 shared

• Thomas J. Csordas

  University of California, San Diego

  9 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Anthropology

  UCLA

• Post-Doctoral Fellow, Instructor, Global Health and Social Medicine

  Harvard Medical School

Awards & honors

• Fellow, American Philosophical Society (2004)
• Visiting Scholar, Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center (20…
• Permanent Member, Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeto…
• Distinguished Visiting Faculty, Monash University (2013)
• Visiting Professor, State University of Rio de Janeiro (2002…