My Nerves Are Bad

Sana Loue is Professor of Epidemiology and Director of the Center for Minority Public Health at Case Western Reserve University. She also holds appointments in the Departments of Bioethics, Psychiatry, and Global Health. Loue is the author of more than a dozen books on gender, ethnicity, immigration, and health. Over a two-year period, the author and her research team followed the lives of fifty-three Puerto Rican women living with severe mental illness as they coped with daily challenges in the areas of family, romantic relationships, employment, social services, substance use, and health care. The team interviewed the women and shadowed them at their homes, churches, schools, physicians' offices, family events, and other occasions in order to understand how their mental illness, their gender, their language, and their culture affected their relationships with others, their understandings of their own situations, and their hopes for themselves and their families.

Following these women as part of a study was a complicated task - one that Loue and her research team accomplished, resulting in a compelling book. - Journal of HIV/AIDS & Social Services ""The narratives presented in the text paint a poignant picture of what it means to be marginalized from society as Latina women who live and struggle with sever mental illness. Recommended."" - Choice