Anthropology of Mental Health in Israel and the Diaspora

4 credits

Like other modern nation-states, mental health in Israel is constituted by therapeutic interventions that assume that psychiatry, psychotherapy, and social work are the “taken for granted” ways to treat mental disorders. Drawing upon diverse ethnographies and using the tools of medical anthropology and psychological anthropology, we will examine the role and work of these experts and analyze how their expertise is contested by diverse groups. Prerequisites: upper-division standing.