Emily Mendenhall

Emily Mendenhall
Alma mater	Northwestern University
Scientific career
Institutions	Georgetown University
Thesis	The VIDDA Syndemic : Distress and Diabetes in Social and Cultural Context (2012)

Emily Mendenhall is a medical anthropologist, Guggenheim Fellow, and Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her research considers syndemics: the clustering of epidemics, driven by social and structural factors. She was awarded the 2017 Society for Medical Anthropology George Foster Award.

Early life and education

Mendenhall earned a Masters of Public Health at Emory University. She completed her doctoral research at Northwestern University. Her doctoral research explored the intersection of psychological and social suffering of people living with diabetes and depression. In particular, she focussed on the experiences of Mexican immigrant women living in Chicago. She introduced the concept of the "The VIDDA Syndemic", which comprised five overlapping issues, (i) violence, (ii) immigration and isolation, (iii) depression, (iv) diabetes and (v) abuse (verbal, emotional and sexual). She concluded that women's physical suffering could not be separated from their surrounding environment. It informed her later book, Rethinking Diabetes, which examined the global and local factors that transformed how diabetes was perceived.

Research and career

Mendenhall is interested in syndemics; a group of epidemics caused by detrimental social and structural factors, where the interplay between these epidemics leads to increased illness and death rates.

In 2017 she led a series in The Lancet on syndemics; how health and social conditions travel together. In 2023 she was awarded Guggenheim Fellowship from John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Mendenhall extensively explored syndemics in Soweto, South Africa. She showed that Black women living in Soweto were diagnosed with breast cancer too late for successful treatments, and believed that the treatments (e.g. chemotherapy) were much worse than the cancer itself. She called for people to recognise the significance of social and structural drivers of stress.

Mendenhall studied how people in northwest Iowa responded to COVID-19. She assessed how failures in state politics, a breakdown in negotiations and lack of trust in science caused Okoboji to be declared as a coronavirus hotspot. She demonstrated that small communities in America held deep isolationist popular beliefs. Mendenhall suffered from Long COVID. She wrote about her experiences of brain fog in Scientific American. She has explored how the medical system and society support people living with chronic conditions, from lupus to Lyme disease and long Covid. Her anthropological work on COVID-19 was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Awards and honours

• 2017 George Foster Award
• 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship

Select publications

• Merrill Singer; Nicola Bulled; Bayla Ostrach; Emily Mendenhall (1 March 2017). "Syndemics and the biosocial conception of health". The Lancet. 389 (10072): 941–950. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(17)30003-X. ISSN 0140-6736. PMID 28271845. Wikidata Q39167829.
• Emily Mendenhall; Brandon A Kohrt; Shane A Norris; David Ndetei; Dorairaj Prabhakaran (1 March 2017). "Non-communicable disease syndemics: poverty, depression, and diabetes among low-income populations". The Lancet. 389 (10072): 951–963. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(17)30402-6. ISSN 0140-6736. PMC 5491333. PMID 28271846. Wikidata Q39167835.
• Emily Mendenhall; Mary J De Silva; Charlotte Hanlon; et al. (29 July 2014). "Acceptability and feasibility of using non-specialist health workers to deliver mental health care: stakeholder perceptions from the PRIME district sites in Ethiopia, India, Nepal, South Africa, and Uganda". Social Science & Medicine. 118: 33–42. doi:10.1016/J.SOCSCIMED.2014.07.057. ISSN 0277-9536. PMC 4167946. PMID 25089962. Wikidata Q34207184.

Books

• Mendenhall, Emily (2016). Syndemic suffering: social distress, depression, and diabetes among Mexican immigrant women. Advances in critical medical anthropology. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-61132-142-5.
• Mendenhall, Emily (2019). Rethinking diabetes: entanglements with trauma, poverty, and HIV. Ithaca [New York]: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-1-5017-3831-9.
• Mendenhall, Emily (2022). Unmasked: covid, community, and the case of Okoboji. Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press. ISBN 978-0-8265-0454-8.