In the United States, young people are remanded to psychiatric custody for the institutionalized treatment of mental illness, behavior disorders, and emotional disturbances, and forced to participate in this therapeutic system. Anthropological investigations of therapeutic process have focused on individuals actively seeking and engaging in treatment or a therapeutic process. Does transformation require a person fully accept the therapeutic system? Is a coerced therapeutic process still effective? This article engages with these questions by situating the therapeutic process in psychiatric custody for American adolescents. The youth in treatment accept that transformation and even healing take place but locate the etiology and form of this change differently than the official treatment paradigms. This case study illustrates that transformation and therapeutic process as multifaceted, especially in coercive contexts, and the efficacy of the therapeutic process as shaped by the life stage and political contexts of those engaged in the process.

In this article, I discuss the meanings of "restraints," or physical intervention strategies that are used at a total institution for mentally ill adolescents in the United States. This paper argues that this particularly complex form of mental health treatment is simultaneously a violent and an intimate way in which men relate to one another and also takes on complex meanings about trust and identity in mental health recovery. Using data from 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork at one residential treatment center, this article examines what restraints reveal and embody about intimate interpersonal staff/client relationships, how Black men relate to one another in this setting and how staff members use physical interventions to link institutional mental health treatment with street violence in the outside world. I conclude that understanding these meanings of restraints provides a valuable way of understanding local knowledge in mental health practice, treatment and recovery.

Physical fitness has a long history in the United States. Currently, functional fitness has emerged as a popular, novel method of exercising. Based on years of ethnographic research on a branded version of functional fitness, I argue this form of exercise is an audit system and culture, initiated by the creators of the brand itself, implemented in the gyms, and governed by the participants. This article illustrates that such an exercise regimen is a response to the post-9/11 world-complete with war on terror, economic insecurity, and border security threatsand provides a window into the necropolitics of elite, white America due to an uncertain, neoliberal future. [fitness, audit culture, race, zombie apocalypse, United States] RESUMEN Un buen estado físico tiene una larga historia en los Estados Unidos. Actualmente, la forma física funcional ha emergido como un método popular, novedoso de ejercicio. Basado en años de investigación etnográfica sobre una versión de marca del estado físico funcional, argumento que esta forma de ejercicio es un sistema de auditoría y cultura, iniciado por los creadores de la marca misma, implementado en los gimnasios y gobernado por los participantes. Este artículo ilustra que tal régimen de ejercicio es una respuesta al mundo posterior al 11 de septiembre-completo con la guerra contra el terror, la inseguridad económica y las amenazas a la seguridad de las fronteras-y provee una ventana a la necropolítica de la élite, América blanca debido a un futuro neoliberal, incierto. [estado físico, cultura de auditoría, raza, apocalipsis zombi, Estados Unidos]

No abstract