Violence and Healing, Pandemics and Everyday Life: Mental Health and Illness in Africa

Harvard FAS

An introduction to African perspectives on mental illness, exploring the development and practice of psychiatry as a medical field in Africa, examining the grey areas within psychiatric knowledge, and engaging the ongoing debates about the interface between race, culture and psychiatry. Will review African therapeutic systems; witchcraft, causation and mental health; substance abuse; violence and mental illness; and more recent links between HIV/AIDS, loss and depression.