{"id":297,"date":"2019-08-28T16:07:21","date_gmt":"2019-08-28T16:07:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2019\/?page_id=297"},"modified":"2019-08-28T16:07:21","modified_gmt":"2019-08-28T16:07:21","slug":"cristina-hanganu-bresch","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2019\/cristina-hanganu-bresch\/","title":{"rendered":"Cristina Hanganu-Bresch"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Title:<\/strong>\u00a0<\/span>Associate Professor<\/span><\/p>\n

University: <\/strong>University of the the Sciences (Philadelphia)<\/span><\/p>\n

Email:\u00a0<\/strong>c.hanganu-bresch@usciences.edu<\/span>; <\/span>changanu@hotmail.com<\/span><\/p>\n

Twitter: <\/strong>@crisoi<\/span><\/p>\n

Website:<\/strong> hanganubresch.com (under construction)<\/span><\/p>\n

Description of your work<\/b><\/h3>\n

I\u2019ve been intrigued by the conceptualization of mental illness and our struggles to define it, represent it, and accord it ontological status. The visual representation of depression, for example, was the focus of my dissertation and a couple of publications; I was intrigued by the visual rhetoric of ads for psychopharmaceuticals, which were trying to construct the type of patient afflicted by visible \u201csadness\u201d who could be helped, or in other words made \u201chappy\u201d, through chemical interventions. This work led to a collaborative research effort with the late Carol Berkenkotter, which resulted in a series of articles and a book that looks at the struggle of diagnosing asylum patients in the 19th century, at a time when psychiatry also grappled with its status as a legitimate medical specialty (Diagnosing Madness,<\/i> U of South Carolina P 2019). One concept central to our work was that of uptake, which we used in the context of the impact that naming a disease had on the life of the patients and their family. Once a mental illness diagnosis was conferred (even one temporary or transient, which collapsed later under the scrutiny of Kraepelinean psychiatry, such as that of \u201cmoral insanity\u201d), the life circumstances of a patient altered irrevocably, and patients often fought back to contest what they deemed to be their wrongful asylum confinement and reclaim their lives.<\/p>\n

The uptake of a psychiatric diagnosis is still at the core of my recent work on orthorexia nervosa, a putative eating disorder characterized by a pathological obsession with eating right. Is orthorexia a \u201cnew\u201d disease? Will it enter the DSM? What does clinical research on orthorexia have to offer so far? Aligned with healthism, orthorexia does seem to spring from a miscalculation of health risks associated with food and from confusing and ubiquitous media\/social media messages regarding \u201chealthy food.\u201d Do we live in an \u201corthorexic society,\u201d and what are the consequences of such an obsession? These questions and more are central to my book project on orthorexia and were briefly touched upon in my recent article on the topic in Medical Humanities (<\/i>https:\/\/mh.bmj.com\/content\/early\/2019\/07\/28\/medhum-2019-011681<\/span><\/a>)<\/span>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Title:\u00a0Associate Professor University: University of the the Sciences (Philadelphia) Email:\u00a0c.hanganu-bresch@usciences.edu; changanu@hotmail.com Twitter: @crisoi Website: hanganubresch.com (under construction) Description of your work I\u2019ve been intrigued by the conceptualization of mental illness … Continue reading “Cristina Hanganu-Bresch”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-297","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/297\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":301,"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/297\/revisions\/301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2019\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}