Thursday, February 25th Richard Grinker PhD and Jonathan Lear PhD discussed Dr. Grinker’s book, Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness, a compassionate and eye-opening examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness. Grinker infuses the book with the personal history of his family’s four generations of involvement in psychiatry, including his grandfather’s analysis with Sigmund Freud, his own daughter’s experience with autism and his research on neurosdiversity. Nobody’s Normal explains how we are transforming mental illness and offers a path to end the shadow of stigma. In case you missed it, here’s the link.
Richard Grinker is a Professor of Anthropology at George Washington University and Editor-in-Chief of Anthropological Quarterly. He was born and raised in Chicago where his father, grandfather and great grandfather practiced psychoanalysis. He has conducted research on huntergatherers in central Africa, North Korean defectors in South Korea, and the epidemiology of autism. In 2008, his book Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism was the recipient of the National Alliance on Mental Illness KEN award for “outstanding contribution to the understanding of mental illness.”
Jonathan Lear is the John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor at the Committee on Social Thought and in Philosophy at the University of Chicago and the Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society. His research focuses on the conceptions of the human psyche from Socrates, Plato and Aristotle to the present. He is a trained psychoanalyst and a member of the faculty of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute.
This program was co-sponsored by the Institute and Bookends and Beginnings bookstore Evanston, IL. You can buy the book on their online store.
