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pece_annotation_1479088983

Andreas_Rebmann
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Byron J. Good, the author of this book is currently a professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard, with his research focusing on mental health services development in Asian societies, particularly in Indonesia. He has done collaborative work with the International Organization for Migration on developing mental health services in post-tsunami and post-conflict Aceh, Indonesia. More broadly, he works on the theorization of subjectivity in contemporary societies.

pece_annotation_1479088920

Andreas_Rebmann
Annotation of
In response to

Byron J. Good, the author of this book is currently a professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard, with his research focusing on mental health services development in Asian societies, particularly in Indonesia. He has done collaborative work with the International Organization for Migration on developing mental health services in post-tsunami and post-conflict Aceh, Indonesia. More broadly, he works on the theorization of subjectivity in contemporary societies.

pece_annotation_1479089105

Andreas_Rebmann
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The research is mostly done observationally, from Good’s own experiences trying to do other research in Turkey

How is emergency response addressed in the article or report:

It isn’t, but the take-aways of trying to access a patient’s history through the lens of their narrative help to explain the difficulty of getting at the root issue while dealing with a patient

pece_annotation_1479089077

Andreas_Rebmann
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“During our interviews in Turkey, many of the conversations we had - with those suffering seizures, with family members, persons in the community, and health care providers - were made up largely of stories. We were told stories of the sudden and shocking onset of seizures or fainting, of particularly dramatic episodes of seizures or extended loss of consciousness, of years of efforts in which families and individuals engaged in a quest to find a cure, of especially memorable interactions with physicians and with religious healers, and of experiences at work, with friends, and, for example, in marriage negotiations that were influenced by the illness.”

“The same issue was raised in our attempts to elicit a "history" of the illness _ again, a problem shared by physicians who attempt to elicit a clinical history. The stories we heard were life stories, and the temporal structure was organized around events of importance to individuals and families.”

“Narrative is a form in which experience is represented and recounted, in which events are presented as having a meaningful and coherent order, in which activities and events are described along with the experiences associated with them and the significance that lends them their sense for the persons involved. But experience always far exceeds its description or narrativization.”

pece_annotation_1479089050

Andreas_Rebmann
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Good begins with explaining his own experiences working with patients suffering from epilepsy in Turkey, and his struggle to better understand the history of their illness

He then proceeds to give an in-detail explanation of one such patient, going into the specifics of the lack of clarity, and explaining the cultural connotation of different aspects of the patient-provided story, explaining why they might be muddled or less than accurate.

Next he looks at the work of others in the field, trying to get a better way of assessing the experiences of others and understanding their narrative without knowing everything they know.