Psychiatric Encounters

Beatriz Mireya Reyes-Foster is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

“This ethnography of a single psychiatric hospital broadens into a trenchant critique of the persistence of colonial structures in the Mexican state and the psyche of its citizens. Reyes-Foster analyzes intimate clinical encounters through a double optic: Mexico’s neoliberal political economy and its ambivalent modernization. The book is ultimately a tragic story of how subjective, institutional and national fractures all mirror each other. But its intellectual breadth–from Fanon to Foucault to contemporary indigenous anthropology–charts a new course for the cultural study of psychiatry.” - Paul E. Brodwin (author of Everyday Ethics: Voices from the Front Lines of Community Psychiatry) “A bold and original study of a mental asylum in Mexico. Theoretically innovative and ethnographically rich, Reyes-Foster links discourses and experiences of coloniality, madness and modernity in creative, important ways.” - Angela Garcia (author of The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande) "Recommended." (Choice) "A welcome intervention to psychiatric anthropology as well as to the field of global mental health." (Medical Anthropology Quarterly) "The clear strength of Psychiatric Encounters lies in its complex yet compelling account of how relations of power shaping contemporary psychiatric practice are products of Mexico's troublesome histories of coloniality and neoliberal modernity." (American Anthropologist)

• ContentsList of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsNote on TextForeword1 Introduction: Las Lomas at the Threshold of Modernity2 Coloniality, La Zona del Estar, and Yucatan’s Maya Heritage3 Making the Matrix4 Modernity: Problem and Promise of Mexican Psychiatry5 Psychiatric Encounters6 In the Heart of Madness7 EpilogueNotesBibliographyIndexAbout the Author