Gerpha Gerlin (2024)

Gerpha Gerlin is a doctoral candidate in anthropology and a master's student in public health at Northwestern University. She studies chronic mental illness and disability, cross- cultural and user-informed perspectives on psychiatry, and implementation science.

Her dissertation project, a clinical ethnography based in an urban US outpatient clinic, examines how young adults with schizophrenia conceptualize and approach their respective recovery. Of central interest is the extent to which contemporary biomedical understandings of the condition map onto patients' lived experiences.

Overlapping interests include media representations of psychological distress and mental illness; disability in higher education; and suicide etiology. In addition to her studies, Gerpha works as a research assistant with the Center for Community Health on a community-based research curriculum project, alongside coordinating the Northwestern Prison Education Program's Wellness team. The National Institute for Social Sciences Dissertation grant will support Gerpha's fieldwork, including site travel; the purchase of equipment; and participant remuneration.