Congratulations to the 2016 Duncan Pedersen Global Mental Health Award recipient, Sakiko Yamaguchi.
Sakiko Yamaguchi is a PhD student in the Division for Transcultural Psychiatry and the Douglas University Institute. A former student of Duncan Pedersen, she is now working under the under the supervision of Dr. Thomas Brown, Dr. Allan Young, and Dr. Ines Bustamante (Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia). She holds a Master of Science in Mental Health Services and Population Research from the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, UK and a Master of Science in Planning from University of Guelph, Ontario.
“Am I drinking too much?”-Alcohol misuse among the Andean Highland Population in Huamanga Province, Ayacucho, Peru
Sakiko's PhD research project focuses on understanding the phenomenon of alcohol use and misuse from the perspective of the Andean highland population in Peru. On one hand, alcohol misuse in Ayacucho region located in the south-central Peru is a grave public health concern. On the other hand, for Andean people, collective drinking has played important socio-cultural roles, such as strengthening social connectedness, establishing Quechua identity, and defining an individual's role in the community hierarchy. The observed increase in alcohol consumption following 20 years of political violence that ended in 2000 is partly explained by alcohol use as a means of coping with emotional pain from war trauma and daily stress rooted in persistent poverty. Also, fiestas characterized by collective drunkenness became a way of restoring the disrupted social unity in some areas, while the ritual function of collective drinking was weakened by its transformation into chronic aimless binge drinking at small social gatherings and/or drinking in solitude in others. While there is a tension between the negative health and social outcomes of excessive drinking and the significance of culturally-embedded drinking behavior, effective prevention and intervention need to understand the meanings implicated in the drinking behavior of the Andean indigenous population, and the multiple perspectives that make sense of the behavior within an Andean sociocultural context. In response to this knowledge gap, her qualitative study aims to answer the following questions: 1) What are the current patterns of alcohol misuse among the Andean populations and associated values (e.g. meanings)?, 2) How have the drinking practices intertwined with Andean cultural values been adapted in response to social, political, and economic changes?, and 3) In what way do the structural forces such as socio-economic inequality and alcohol industry explain the current alcohol misuse among the Andean highland population?
During her eight-month fieldwork in 2016-2017, she collected data through 1) key informant interviews with health workers, school teachers, alcohol vendors, police, and community people, 2) focus groups with community people, health workers, and school teachers, and 3) individual interviews with people who are considered as at-risk drinkers, and 4) participation observation. With a strong motivation to be an action-oriented researcher, she is ambitious to translate the research findings into community-based preventive actions and interventions for harmful alcohol use.
