Janis H. Jenkins

Janis H. Jenkins
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Alma mater	Harvard Medical School University of California, Los Angeles
Occupation	Professor Researcher

Janis Hunter Jenkins, Ph.D. is a Psychological and Medical Anthropologist with expertise in culture and mental health. Currently, she is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Psychiatry at the University of California San Diego, and Founding Director for the Center for Global Mental Health at UCSD.

Education

Janis H. Jenkins received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. She completed post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Social Medicine and Health Policy (currently, the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine).

Career

Prior to her tenure at UCSD, Jenkins was appointed as Assistant Research Anthropologist (1984-1986) in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA. In 1986, she moved to Boston, Massachusetts, to join the NIMH-funded post-doctoral training program “Clinically Relevant Medical Anthropology,” directed by Professors Arthur Kleinman and Byron Good. She was appointed as a Research Fellow from 1986-1999, and while at Harvard, she was also Instructor for courses within the Departments of Anthropology (“Ethnopsychology of Emotion,” Freshman Seminar Program) and Social Medicine (“Doctor-Patient Relationship”). In 1990, Dr. Jenkins joined the faculty in the Departments of Anthropology and Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University and served as Director of Women’s Studies Program (1992-1996; 1997-2000). In 2006, Professor Jenkins joined the faculty in the Departments of Anthropology and Psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego in 2006.

Dr. Janis Jenkins has been awarded several visiting and scholarly appointments, including as Visiting Scholar-in-Residence at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City (1996-1997), Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Social Medicine, State University of Rio de Janeiro (2002), Research Fellow, American Philosophical Society (2004-2005), Member-in-Residence, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey (2011-2012), Distinguished Visiting Faculty at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia (2013), and Visiting Scholar for the Writing Residency of the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Italy (2021).

Dr. Jenkins has been recipient of the Young Investigator Award by the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (Currently, the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation; 1988-1990). For original research contribution to psychological anthropology, Jenkins was awarded the Stirling Prize for Contributions to Psychological Anthropology (1990) by the American Anthropological Association, Society for Psychological Anthropology.

She has been awarded research funding from the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health, as Principal Investigator for a study on "Sociocultural Factors and Course of Persistent Mental Illness, National Institute of Mental Health” (NIMH Grant MH 47920; 1990-1996) and “Culture, Schizophrenia, and Atypical Antipsychotics” (NIMH Grant R01 MH 60232; 1999-2004), Co-Investigator and Co-Principal Investigator, “Southwest Youth & Experience of Psychiatric Treatment” (NIMH Grant: R01 MH071781). In addition, over the course of her career, Jenkins served as Co-Investigator and as a Mentor for NIMH-funded studies. Dr. Jenkins served as a member of three scientific review groups for NIMH (“Emotion and Personality,” 1993-1994; "Social, Personality, & Group Processes,” 1994-1998; and “Treatment and Services,” 2003-2005).

In other sources of funding, Dr. Jenkins has been awarded research grants for studies on “Cultural Perceptions of Adolescent ‘Bienestar Emocional’ (Emotional Well-Being) and Patterns of Help Seeking: An Anthropological Study in Tijuana, Mexico” (University of California, San Diego, Faculty Senate Grant, 2016-2018); “Well-Being and Mental Health of Adolescents: Community Collaboration and Technological Innovations” (Grant C6009, Frontiers of Innovation Scholars Program, Office Research Affairs, University of California, San Diego, 2017-2020), as well as doctoral dissertation research grants from the National Science Foundation.

Professor Janis Jenkins has trained over 60 Doctoral and Post-Doctoral students (within Anthropology, Psychiatry, Medicine, Social Work).

Research

The major research contributions of Professor Jenkins have been within the fields of psychological and medical anthropology, cultural psychiatry, global mental health, culture and emotion.

A primary focus has been upon the investigation of cultural meaning and lived experience of mental illness and the empirical demonstration of how cultural and social structural features shape the course and outcome of mental health/illness. Dr. Jenkins has worked with interdisciplinary research teams that have employed ethnographic and psychiatric methods of interviewing, observation, and assessment. She and her colleagues were the first team to complete research to demonstrate the significant roles of “expressed emotion” (familial emotional response to an ill relative) in the course and outcome of schizophrenic illness among Spanish-speaking Mexican-descent families (Karno et al 1987). This was the first study demonstrating that Mexican immigrants’ familial emotional responses of warmth and sympathy toward mentally ill kin in the United States contributes to a more favorable course of illness than in the case of their Euro-American counterparts. The research also showed the connection between cultural conceptions of illness and socioemotional response: how people respond to an ill relative depends on what kind of problem they imagine it might be. Jenkins and her colleagues have theorized the research construct of “expressed emotion” as multidimensional features of cultural, psychological, biological, ecological, and political economic contexts (Jenkins and Karno 1992).

Her cross-cultural and transnational studies have included adult and adolescent populations of Mexican, Mexican-American, Salvadoran, Puerto Rican, Euro-American, Vietnamese, African-American, and Native-American populations. These studies have been carried out in home and community settings, including both in-patient and out-patient treatment facilities. Types of illness conditions have ranged from psychotic-related conditions, to depression, anxiety, and psychological trauma, according to research diagnostic clinical criteria. Jenkins’ research teams have found that the social and cultural environment of a person living with a mental illness can also shape the societal stigma and discrimination commonly associated with such conditions.

Notable among her theoretical contributions to the field of psychological anthropology is her formulation of "extraordinary conditions" elaborated in her book, Extraordinary Conditions: Culture and Experience in Mental Illness. This book, along with her subsequent co-authored title, Troubled in The Land of Enchantment: Adolescent Experience of Psychiatric Treatment, explore the cultural shaping of psychological distress, the impress of conditions of structural violence, the fundamental human capacity for struggle, and conceptions of ‘the problem’ in relation to cultural orientations toward normality/abnormality and the ordinary/extraordinary in everyday human experience. Her research with refugees from political violence and persons suffering from various psychiatric conditions shows not only the psychological suffering associated with such conditions, but also the immense capacity that humans can have in the face of such situations. In this way, Jenkins’ research has drawn together the centrality of engaged struggle –rather than symptoms - as fundamental to human capacity and experience.

As a medical and psychological anthropologist, Dr. Jenkins has played a prominent role in advocating the value of interdisciplinary work within anthropology and psychiatry. She has argued, however, that an over-emphasis on neuroscientific and biogenetic features of mental illness constitutes a paradigmatic imbalance that is problematic. Studies of actual persons in communities rather than laboratory extrapolations or empirically unproven hypotheses have stymied intellectual and scientific progress for understanding treatment.

Jenkins’ ethnographic research conducted in environments of political violence has elucidated the role of the nation-state in constructing what she terms “a political ethos,” defined as “culturally organized feeling and sentiment pertaining to social domains of power and interest”. These studies have identified several culturally specific bodily transactions of emotions, such as the experience of el calor (intense heat) among Salvadoran women refugees. The need for recognizing such gendered and culturally specific bodily experience is imperative to avoid medical misdiagnosis and misunderstanding.

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