Extraordinary conditionsilluminates the cultural shaping of extreme psychological suffering and the social rendering of the mentally ill as nonhuman or not fully humanjenkins contends that mental illness is better characterized in terms of struggle than symptoms and that culture is central to all aspects of mental illness from onset to recovery her analysis refashions the boundaries between the ordinary and the extraordinary the routine and the extreme and the healthy and the pathological. Fic types of mental illness and to the cultural con ditions such as political and domestic violence that shape the ways in which mental illness mani fests itself in particular contexts jenkins argues that what links these extraordinary conditions in both senses is the experience of struggle what. Extraordinary conditions culture and experience in mental illness conveys the wisdom of decades negotiating the edge of experience to navigate the sometimes thorny boundaries of anthropology psychiatry and public health jenkins conceptualizes a notion of mental illness that refashions the boundaries between. Extraordinary conditions illuminates the cultural shaping of extreme psychological suffering and the social rendering of the mentally ill as nonhuman or not fully human jenkins contends that mental illness is better characterized in terms of struggle than symptoms and that culture is central to all aspects of mental illness from onset to recovery. Extraordinary conditions culture and experience in mental illness by janis hjenkins oakland university of california press 2015 368 pp 2016 a disability of the soul karen nakamura 2013 06 13 bethel house located in a small fishing village in northern japan was founded in 1984 as an intentional