Professor of Social Medicine
Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry
Adjunct Professor of Anthropology
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
sue_estroff@med.unc.edu
Professor Estroff is deeply engaged with questions of how
sociocultural forces influence the biographical experience of persons
with disabling chronic mental illness. For thirty years she has
studied the correlation between patients' social experiences and
the trajectory of their illnesses. She has focused especially on
the following aspects in psychiatric patients with major disorders:
representations of illness and identity; individual economies of
disability (finessing the financial aspects of survival with a disability);
the impact of disability income on identity and prognosis; and the
effect of mental health or psychiatric services on self-labeling
and illness accounts. Estroff is also involved with research on
violence in persons with serious mental illness—what influence do
interpersonal and contextual factors carry? How is such violence
perceived and addressed by the medical academy, caregivers, and
researchers?
These issues combine to form a thorough examination of the social
experience and treatment of mental illness—from a "micro-ethics"
concern with individual liberties to a "macro-ethics" account of
policy problems. Moral assessments lead to policy design, and the
patient is the ultimate recipient of this process, for better or
for worse. Estroff cautions strongly against any moral economies
or industry agendas that over-medicalize social and psychological
problems, citing a trend in American society and medical practice
that threatens to "reduce the entire drama of human life to chemicals."
Estroff serves as a consultant to state and local Departments of
Mental Health; a member of prominent national and international
committees on mental health policy; and a participant on the editorial
board for the journal Psychiatry. She is a reviewer for numerous
journals and grant review committees in psychiatry, medical anthropology,
and medical humanities, as well as the National Institute of Mental
Health and the National Science Foundation. She is on the faculty
of postdoctoral training and research programs sponsored by National
Institute of Mental Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation,
and is a Research Fellow at the Sheps Center for Health Services
Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Professor Estroff teaches a number of courses stressing an understanding
of medical realities that goes beyond the strictly biological. A
partial listing includes courses on medical and psychiatric anthropology;
and explorations of community and social psychiatry, recovery narratives,
and patient activism. Her book, Making It Crazy: An Ethnography
of Psychiatric Clients in an American Community is in its second
edition and has also been published in French translation as Le
Labyrinthe de la Folie (The Labyrinth of Madness). She is Co-Editor,
with UNC colleagues, of The Social Medicine Reader. Currently Estroff
has a new manuscript in process, Subject and Subjectivity in Dispute,
a study of schizophrenic patients' narratives.
|
