Anthropology of Mental Health

Mental illness and wellbeing have been defined and treated in dramatically different ways across cultures and historical epochs. In this course we engage with religious and secular healing traditions including biomedicine, and the ways in which these shape the experience and understanding of “madness”, of common mental disorders (such as depression and anxiety), and changing perceptions of the normal and the pathological. Drawing on anthropology, psychiatry, philosophy, literature and cinema, we follow the emergence, translation and critique of diagnostic categories across different parts of the contemporary world. Key authors include Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Kleinman, Good, Veena Das, and others.