Culture, Psychiatry, and Mental Illness

Andrew Scull (ed.), Cultural Sociology of Mental Illness : an A-to-Z Guide , Sage, 2014, pp. 31-32, 2014

Madness is a major disorder of social ties and a universal problem for all societies. The formation and transformation of local treatments of madness are therefore a major area of study within social and cultural anthropology. In this perspective, “treatment” should be understood on three different levels. First, as treatment of the problem that madness poses to social order; Second, as treatment of an ailment on the basis of a therapeutic system that can call upon specialist knowledge or not (e.g. a classification, an etiology, a pharmacopoeia, etc.) in order to identify the disorder or to determine its nature and to then provide the appropriate intervention; Finally, as moral treatment of people experiencing madness and trying to find a solution to their state of disorder.

Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2017

While mental illness has recently been framed in largely neurobiological terms as brain disease, there has also been an increasing awareness of the contingency of psychiatric diagnoses. In this course, we will draw upon readings from medical and psychological anthropology, cultural psychiatry, and science studies to examine this paradox and to examine mental health and illness as a set of subjective experiences, social processes and objects of knowledge and intervention. On a conceptual level, the course invites students to think through the complex relationships between categories of knowledge and clinical technologies (in this case, mainly psychiatric ones) and the subjectivities of persons living with mental illness. Put in slightly different terms, we will look at the multiple links between psychiatrists’ professional accounts of mental illness and patients' experiences of it. Questions explored include: Does mental illness vary across social and cultural settings? How are experiences of people suffering from mental illness shaped by psychiatry’s knowledge of their afflictions?

Medicine Anthropology Theory, 2020

In what ways do two bodies of knowledge meet? Anthropology and psychiatry most often meet in a mood of mutual suspicion, the danger of which is that each confronts (or avoids) the other as a straw man. In this introduction I describe a refreshingly different encounter in which a group of psychiatrists from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi respond to an anthropological text, Veena Das’s 'Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty', which engages with lives and issues quite similar to those encountered by these psychiatrists in their clinical practice. Rather than rehearsing relatively predictable debates (for instance on the importance, or lack thereof, of ‘culture’, often assumed to be the sole meeting ground between anthropology and psychiatry), what is instead surprising in the psychiatrists’ engagement with Affliction is their recognition of a shared terrain of uncertainty and complexity that moves across the realms of the spiritual, the ‘vernacular’ uses of...

In this seminar we will explore research and ideas about the cultural contexts of both mental illness and health, at the interface of psychology, medical anthropology, and cultural psychiatry. The course will examine psychiatric approaches, anthropological studies of psychopathology, epidemiology, clinical work, and recent theorizing, and then how all this may contribute to our understanding of the categories and idioms of mental illness. We will look more closely at three psychiatric disorders and suicide. We will also review current work on culture and well-being in order to better understand meanings of mental health.

Culture Medicine and Psychiatry, 2004

Studies in Medical Anthropology: Cambridge, UK. 357pp.

Anthropology and psychiatry have long shared common intellectual and scientific ground. Both are interested in human beings, the societies within which they live and their behaviours. A key starting difference between the two is anthropology’s interest in relativism, whereas psychiatry has been interested in universalism. Also, both anthropology and psychiatry have a long history of common interest in phenomenology and the qualitative dimensions of human experience, as well as a broader comparative and epidemiological approach. Jenkins illustrates the common ground by emphasizing that both disciplines contribute to the philosophical questions of and experience raised by cultural diversity in mental illness and healing. Both disciplines also contribute to the practical problems of identifying and treating distress of patients from diverse ethnic, gender, class and religious backgrounds. Psychiatry focuses on individual biography and pathology, thereby giving it a unique relevance and transformation.Patient narratives thus become of great interest to clinicians and anthropologists. Development of specializations such as medical or clinical anthropology puts medicine in general and psychiatry in particular under a magnifying glass. The nexus between anthropology of emotion and the study of psychopathology looks at normality and abnormality, feeling and emotion, variability of course and outcome, among others. The article concludes by highlighting the convergence between these two disciplines as a very fertile ground for the burgeoning field of Global Mental Health.

Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 2009

Psychiatry and anthropology may need each other, as Arthur Kleinman 1 claims, but few guidelines exist for how a psychiatrist and an anthropologist can collaborate successfully to reconcile differences in disciplinary perspectives, methodological approaches, and the place of culture and mind in the interpretation of the outcomes.

While mental illness has recently been framed in largely neurobiological terms as “brain disease,” there has also been an increasing awareness of the contingency of psychiatric diagnoses. In this course, we will draw upon readings from medical and psychological anthropology, cultural psychiatry, and science studies to examine this paradox and to examine mental health and illness as a set of subjective experiences, social processes and objects of knowledge and intervention. On a conceptual level, the course invites students to think through the complex relationships between categories of knowledge and clinical technologies (in this case, mainly psychiatric ones) and the subjectivities of persons living with mental illness. Put in slightly different terms, we will look at the multiple links between psychiatrists’ professional accounts of mental illness and patients' experiences of it. Questions explored include: Does mental illness vary across social and cultural settings? How are experiences of people suffering from mental illness shaped by psychiatry’s knowledge of their afflictions?