"In 2022, Los Angeles became the US city with the largest population of unhoused people, a stark contrast with the city's luxurious hillside mansions. This book from sociologist Neil Gong traces the divide between the haves and have nots by looking to mental health treatment, a key factor in what kind of life a person can live. As Gong shows, the mental health options available to the wealthy versus the poor affects not only the resources they can access, but their very personhood. The Downtown Skid Row area is infamous as "America's homeless capital"-a dumping ground for people with mental illness, ex-prisoners, and addicts. For people diagnosed with mental illness who get caught in the social safety net, often through arrests, the state will largely offer a slate of outpatient tactics. Caseworkers visit individuals regularly to help them with the necessities of functioning independently, such as obtaining identification and shopping for groceries. These services often keep mentally ill people housed, fed, and hopefully out of prison, but they rarely offer treatment for people in psychological distress. They are free but not treated. Across town in West LA or the beach cities, wealthy people diagnosed with serious mental illness attend luxurious treatment centers, from outpatient day clinics to residential programs by the ocean. Programs may offer yoga, holistic care, and farm-to-table organic meals alongside therapeutic treatments and university-affiliated psychiatrists. These treatments aim for psychological wellness, of course, but they also aim to stabilize people's lives, often through programs that greatly limit choice and mobility-families of the wealthy mentally ill expect that their loved ones will be contained. They are treated but not free. Throughout, Gong shows us starkly different ways of understanding people in psychic distress, and divergent ideas and pathways of recovery that may make them into separate kinds of people. At its core, this book project is about the way social context shapes problems and attempts to solve them. The book moves beyond psychiatric care to address issues of urban policy, family dynamics, and, ultimately, the meaning of freedom and personhood in contemporary America"--

The social sciences have seen a substantial increase in comparative and multi-sited ethnographic projects over the last three decades. Yet, at present, researchers seeking to design comparative field projects have few scholarly works detailing how comparison is conducted in divergent ethnographic approaches. In Beyond the Case, Corey M. Abramson and Neil Gong have gathered together several experts in field research to address these issues by showing how practitioners employing contemporary iterations of ethnographic traditions such as phenomenology, grounded theory, positivism, and interpretivism, use comparison in their works. The contributors connect the long history of comparative (and anti-comparative) ethnographic approaches to their contemporary uses. By honing in on how ethnographers render sites, groups, or cases analytically commensurable and comparable, Beyond the Case offers a new lens for examining the assumptions, payoffs, and potential drawbacks of different forms of comparative ethnography.

Any tattoo is the outcome of an intimate, often hidden process. The people, bodies, and money that make tattooing what it is blend together and form a heady cocktail, something described by Matt, the owner of Oakland's Premium Tattoo, as "blood and lightning." Faced with the client's anticipation of pain and excitement, the tattooer must carefully perform calm authority to obscure a world of preparation and vigilance. "Blood and lightning, my dude"—the mysterious and intoxicating effect of tattooing done right. Dustin Kiskaddon draws on his own apprenticeship with Matt and takes us behind the scenes into the complex world of professional tattooers. We join people who must routinely manage a messy and carnal type of work. Blood and Lightning brings us through the tattoo shop, where the smell of sterilizing agents, the hum of machines, and the sound of music spill out onto the back patio. It is here that Matt, along with his comrades, reviews the day's wins, bemoans its losses, and prepares for the future. Having tattooed more than five hundred people, Kiskaddon is able to freshly articulate the physical, mental, emotional, and moral life of tattooers. His captivating account explores the challenges they face on the job, including the crushing fear of making mistakes on someone else's body, the role of masculinity in evolving tattoo worlds, appropriate and inappropriate intimacy, and the task of navigating conversations about color and race. Ultimately, the stories in this book teach us about the roles our bodies play in the social world. Both mediums and objects of art, our bodies are purveyors of sociocultural significance, sites of capitalist negotiation, and vivid encapsulations of the human condition. Kiskaddon guides us through a strangely familiar world, inviting each of us to become a tattooer along the way.

Confined Thoughts By: Gerald Griffin Some of us can only imagine the ominous thoughts of a prison inmate. But Gerald Griffin lives this life every day. Confined Thoughts is his way of mental escape from the prison walls. This collection of trials and tribulations based on personal experiences and struggles from a prison inmate will hopefully make us appreciate the freedoms we experience every day and never take them for granted.

Psychiatry has always aimed to peer deep into the human mind, daring to cast light on its darkest corners and untangle its thorniest knots, often invoking the latest medical science in doing so. But, as Owen Whooley’s sweeping new book tells us, the history of American psychiatry is really a record of ignorance. On the Heels of Ignorance begins with psychiatry’s formal inception in the 1840s and moves through two centuries of constant struggle simply to define and redefine mental illness, to say nothing of the best way to treat it. Whooley’s book is no antipsychiatric screed, however; instead, he reveals a field that has muddled through periodic reinventions and conflicting agendas of curiosity, compassion, and professional striving. On the Heels of Ignorance draws from intellectual history and the sociology of professions to portray an ongoing human effort to make sense of complex mental phenomena using an imperfect set of tools, with sometimes tragic results.

Churchill's 'Black Dog' is widely believed to have been an inborn tendency towards prolonged and despairing depression. In this, the first book-length study of all the available biographical evidence, some of which has never before been published, the truth emerges as significantly less grave than legend has it, but more psychologically complex.

Twenty-year-old Reagan in on a quest for the perfect relationship after a spring break breakup leaves her disillusioned about love. She creates a checklist of all the qualities she wants in a man and vows not to give her heart away again until she can determine if they fit all the criteria. Reagan gets more than she bargained for with her new set of rules and is surprised to find that love and the perfect boyfriend may have been within reach the entire time.