Disciplined Hearts: History, Identity, and Depression in an American Indian Community / Edition 1

by Theresa DeLeane O'Nell

Overview

"This is a good place for your work. Depression is a big problem here. About 70-80% of our people are depressed." When she arrived at the Flathead Reservation in Montana to start an ethnographic study of depression, medical anthropologist Theresa DeLeane O'Nell repeatedly encountered such statements. This astonishingly widespread concern propelled the author into the complex lives of these modern American Indian people and into the historical roots of their contemporary situation.

In Disciplined Hearts, O'Nell draws on recent anthropological theory to locate Flathead depression in the culturally organized experiences of an oppressed people. According to O'Nell, Flathead narratives of depression are tales in which narrators use their demoralization as a guide for modern Indian life. Underlying their tales, she says, is the dramatic assertion that depression is the natural condition of "real Indians"—those who have "disciplined" their hearts by recasting their personal sadness into compassion for others.

This rich account of family and community life describes the moral imagination with which Flathead Indian people weave together historical and personal loss, American Indian identity, and social responsibility. Based on her ethnographic and clinical work, O'Nell pinpoints American Indian depression within a complex interplay of cultural ideas of the self and the Indian family, emotion and ethnic identity, and historical relations between Indians and whites.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520214460
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	12/15/1998
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	265
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Theresa DeLeane O'Nell is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center and Director of Ethnographic Research at the National Center for American Indian and Alaska Native Mental Health Research.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction

PART I. HISTORY AND IDENTITY
I. Telling about Whites, Talking about Indians
2. The Making and the Unmaking of the "Real Indians"

PART II. LONELINESS AND PITY
3· Speaking to the Heart
4· Feeling Bereaved, Feeling Aggrieved, and Feeling Worthless

PART III. LONELINESS AND DEPRESSION
5· Speaking from the Heart
6. Culture and Depression

Afterword
Notes
References
Index

Editorial Reviews

O'Nell (National Center for American Indian and Alaska Native Mental Health Research) draws on recent anthropological theory to relate depression on the Flathead Reservation in Montana to the culturally organized experiences of an oppressed people. She examines narratives of depression by Flathead residents, and describes American Indian depression as an interplay of ideas of the self and the family, ethnic identity, and relations between Indians and whites. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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