Who's Crazy? Mapping Mental Health Across Cultures

1 credits · Undergraduate

What does it mean to be mentally healthy, or mentally ill, and how do the answers differ across communities, countries, and continents? Mental health now dominates public conversation, and many are eager to champion global mental health. But intervention and understanding can be complicated, and when poorly conceived, harmful. This course takes an anthropological, comparative approach, examining how social, historical, cultural, and economic forces shape what counts as illness and how people suffer and heal. We begin with journalist Ethan Watters' Crazy Like Us as an entry point, reading it against the work of scholars who spent years in the places he describes: anorexia in Hong Kong, trauma in Sri Lanka, depression in Japan, and schizophrenia in Zanzibar. We then turn to the global reach of psychiatric categories, idioms of distress, and community care, closing with mental illness and gun violence in the United States.