ANTHR 2424

Culture and Mental Health: Anthropological Perspectives

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2022-2023. Courses of Study 2022-2023 is scheduled to publish mid-June.

Global Mental Health is a growing and important field within the general category of Global Public Health. Anthropology has an established and long history of contributing to the debates about cross-cultural psychiatry and psychotherapy, as well as to the perennial questions of nature versus nurture in defining normal versus pathological ways of being human. Cross-cultural explanations for varied and/or universal forms of human subjectivity, affect, and personality are increasingly relevant given new research into neurological plasticity, genomics, and the dissemination and practice of evidence-based and pharmaceutically-oriented psychiatry at the expense of more holistic and culturally nuanced forms of care. We examine the efficacy of traditional and community-based mental health practices in non-Western contexts as well as the challenges to accessibile care posed by inequality and precarity, as well as the stigmas surrounding mental illness in varied cultural contexts.

When Offered Fall.

Breadth Requirement (GB)
Distribution Category (GLC-AS, SBA-AS, SCD-AS)

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