Anthropology of Mental Illness

4.0 credits

Mental illness (or madness) has long been of interest to sociocultural, medical, and psychological anthropologists, in part because it can serve as a lens through which to understand difference or deviance across and within societies. In this course we will explore the ways mental illness is understood and experienced across different cultural contexts. We will begin with the long-standing anthropological insight that culture shapes how persons experience and respond to illness. In particular, given the proliferation of biological models of mental illness in our contemporary world, we will examine psychiatry as a culture of its own: we will explore how ‘psy’ knowledge is created and how they transform over time and space; how persons inhabit or are made to inhabit diagnostic categories; and how various social actors experiment with diagnostic categories and therapeutic practices—such as psychopharmaceuticals, religious and spiritual rituals, and psychotherapy. Additionally, our survey of the literature considers social epidemiology, looking at the intersections of psychic distress and various social identities—such as gender, life-stage transitions, class, race, and immigration status. Thus, we will develop a comprehensive understanding of mind and mental illness as shaped by both cultural contexts and social structures, enriching anthropological theories of subjectivity and psychiatric theories of mental illness and mental health.