Models of Illness: The Ethnography of Homeless Women

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

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Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): It is the purpose of this research to provide a clearer understanding of the way unhoused women with serious mental illness come to understand mental illness, their symptoms, the cause of their problems and of their homelessness so that from this work it will be possible to develop eventually an intervention to engage, treat and help these women find their own ways back into the community. The specific aims are: 1. to determine what women learn about mental illness, implicitly or explicitly, as they navigate the standard services available to them 2. to identify the different ways in which unhoused or once-unhoused women describe their own trouble, especially as it is recognizable to an observer as mental illness; 3. to understand the ways in which these women come to accept, when they do, an identity which includes mental illness and the consequence for them. 4. to identify approaches taken by service providers that these unhoused women feel are appropriate and helpful. To accomplish these aims, we will use traditional ethnography and novel qualitative methods. The team consists of a traditional anthropologist with two field assistants, a mental health services research anthropologist, and a mental health services researcher with more than a decade of experience in a community care setting.