Culture, Psychiatry, and Mental Illness (2022 Version)

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?

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.

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?

Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2017

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.

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.

The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2018

Cultural psychiatry (transcultural psychiatry, cross-cultural psychiatry, or ethnopsychiatry) is an interdisciplinary field of research and clinical practice concerned with the impact of culture on mental health and illness. Culture, in this context, refers to the shared knowledge, practices, values, and institutions that constitute particular ways of life of communities or groups. The different terms for the field reflect particular intellectual and research traditions as well as changing configurations of the social world, but all address questions of enduring importance concerning variations in the causes, experience, expression, and course of mental health problems and the efficacy of specific modes of individual or collective coping, social response, and healing practices. In addition to these scientific questions, cultural psychiatry is an applied health discipline that aims to develop methods of clinical assessment, treatment, and prevention of mental health problems appropriate for culturally diverse populations. Finally, cultural psychiatry is concerned with psychiatry itself as a cultural institution, critically examining its social history, cultural assumptions, and impact on society. This self-reflexive aspect of the field provides a basis for intercultural dialogue and knowledge exchange.

Culture Medicine and Psychiatry, 2004

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

Kirmayer, L. J. (2007). Cultural psychiatry in historical perspective. In D. Bhugra & K. Bhui (Eds.), Textbook of Cultural Psychiatry (pp. 3-19). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cultural psychiatry stands at the crossroads of disciplines concerned with the impact of culture on behavior and experience. It emerges from a history of encounters between people of different backgrounds struggling to understand and respond to human suffering in contexts that confound the alien qualities of psychopathology with the strangeness of the cultural 'other'. The construct of culture offers one way to conceptualize such difference, allowing us to bring together race, ethnicity and ways of life under one broad rubric to examine the impact of social knowledge, institutions, and practices on health, illness and healing. Cultural psychiatry differs from the social sciences of medicine, however, in being driven primarily not by theoretical problems but by clinical imperatives. The choice of research questions and methods, no less than the interpretation of findings and the framing of professional practice, is shaped by this clinical agenda, which emphasizes the quest for therapeutic efficacy.