In this book, Leinman proposes an international view of mental illness and mental care. He examines how the prevalence and nature of disorders vary in different cultures, how clinicians make their diagnoses, and how they heal, and the educational and practical implications of a true understanding of the interplay between biology and culture.

Rethinking Psychiatry: From Cultural Category to Personal Experience

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Kleinman, Arthur

Mental Health

Free Press

Soul of Care

Penguin

This timely volume describes the emergence of a crisis in world mental health. It analyzes the growing burden of mental, behavioral and social problems in low-income countries, examines the sources of the substantial morbidity rates and their relation to development, and assesses current efforts to cope with them. It identifies opportunities for effective mental health interventions, methods of treatment, culturally appropriate prevention programs, and sound policy formation. It relates the mental health consequences of violence, dislocation, poverty, and the disenfranchisement of women to the most pressing economic, political, and environmental problems of our time. Because many of the problems reviewed in this volume occur in both low-income and high-income societies, fruitful comparison and collaboration between North and South can lead to mental health policies that can be applied in many settings. The book is the result of several years of collaboration between experts from more than 19 countries and researchers in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. The authors examine key findings on mental illness and mental health services; suicide; substance abuse; the mental health problems of women, children and the elderly; violence; dislocation; and health-related behavior in Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. They recommend new actions in mental health services, in public health and public policy, as well as an agenda for research. For all who are interested in the global context of mental health and in development, this very readable volume with its numerous case studies, illustrations and tables will be an invaluable resource.

World Mental Health: Problems and Priorities in Low-Income Countries

Eisenberg, Leon

Good, Byron

Oxford Univ. Pr.

Social Origins of Distress and Disease: Depression, Neurasthenia, and Pain in Modern China

Medical Books

Medicine

Yale University Press

Yale Univ Pr

From one of America's most celebrated psychiatrists, the book that has taught generations of healers why healing the sick is about more than just diagnosing their illness Western medicine treats sick patients like broken machines -- figure out what is physically wrong, fix it, and send the patient on their way. But humans are not machines. When we are ill, we experience our illness: we become scared, distressed, tired, weary. Our illnesses are not just biological conditions, but human ones. It was Arthur Kleinman, a Harvard psychiatrist and anthropologist, who saw this truth when most of his fellow doctors did not. Based on decades of clinical experience studying and treating chronic illness, The Illness Narratives makes a case for interpreting the illness experience of patients as a core feature of doctoring. Before Being Mortal or The Body Keeps the Score, there was The Illness Narratives. It remains today a prescient and passionate case for bridging the gap between patient and practitioner.

The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, And The Human Condition

Psychology & Counseling

Basic Books

From the Preface, by Arthur Kleinman:Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture presents a theoretical framework for studying the relationship between medicine, psychiatry, and culture. That framework is principally illustrated by materials gathered in field research in Taiwan and, to a lesser extent, from materials gathered in similar research in Boston. The reader will find this book contains a dialectical tension between two reciprocally related orientations: it is both a cross-cultural (largely anthropological) perspective on the essential components of clinical care and a clinical perspective on anthropological studies of medicine and psychiatry. That dialectic is embodied in my own academic training and professional life, so that this book is a personal statement. I am a psychiatrist trained in anthropology. I have worked in library, field, and clinic on problems concerning medicine and psychiatry in Chinese culture. I teach cross-cultural psychiatry and medical anthropology, but I also practice and teach consultation psychiatry and take a clinical approach to my major cross-cultural teaching and research involvements. The theoretical framework elaborated in this book has been applied to all of those areas; in turn, they are used to illustrate the theory. Both the theory and its application embody the same dialectic. The purpose of this book is to advance both poles of that dialectic: to demonstrate the critical role of social science (especially anthropology and cross-cultural studies) in clinical medicine and psychiatry and to encourage study of clinical problems by anthropologists and other investigators involved in cross-cultural research.

Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture: An Exploration of the Borderland Between Anthropology, Medicine, and Psychiatry (Volume 5)

Alternative Medicine

University of California Press

Some of the most innovative and provocative work on the emotions and illness is occurring in cross-cultural research on depression. Culture and Depression presents the work of anthropologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists who examine the controversies, agreements, and conceptual and methodological problems that arise in the course of such research. A book of enormous depth and breadth of discussion, Culture and Depression enriches the cross-cultural study of emotions and mental illness and leads it in new directions. It commences with a historical study followed by a series of anthropological accounts that examine the problems that arise when depression is assessed in other cultures. This is a work of impressive scholarship which demonstrates that anthropological approaches to affect and illness raise central questions for psychiatry and psychology, and that cross-cultural studies of depression raise equally provocative questions for anthropology.

Culture and Depression: Studies in the Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder (Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care) (Volume 16)

Good, Byron J.

Chronic pain challenges the central tenet of biomedicine: that objective knowledge of the human body and mind is possible apart from subjective experience and social context. Sufferers, finding that chronic pain alters every aspect of life, often become frustrated and distrust a profession seemingly unable to explain or effectively treat their illness. The authors of this innovative volume offer an entirely different, ethnographic approach, searching out more effective ways to describe and analyze the human context of pain. How can we analyze a mode of experience that appears to the pain sufferer as an unmediated fact of the body and is yet so resistant to language? With case studies drawn from anthropological investigations of chronic pain sufferers and pain clinics in the northeastern United States, the authors explore the great divide between the culturally shaped language of suffering and the traditional language of medical and psychological theorizing. They argue that the representation of experience in local social worlds is a central challenge to the human sciences and to ethnographic writing, and that meeting that challenge is also crucial to the refiguring of pain in medical discourse and health policy debates. Anthropologists, scholars from the medical social sciences and humanities, and many general readers will be interested in Pain as Human Experience. In addition, behavioral medicine and pain specialists, psychiatrists, and primary care practitioners will find much that is relevant to their work in this book.

Pain as Human Experience: An Anthropological Perspective (Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care) (Volume 31)

Politics & Social Sciences

Brodwin, Paul

Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio

Social Sciences

Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine

Kleinman (anthropology and social medicine, Harvard U.) has revised seven previously published essays and framed them with a new introduction and final chapter. Three explain the principles of what he calls a sociosomatic approach to medicine that considers the body as a mediator between individual and collective experience. The others apply the ideas to his work with the effects of China's Cultural Revolution, involuntary abortion, and other cases. The final chapter urges others to enter medical anthropology, where there is still plenty of elbow room. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Univ. Of California Pr.

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