ATH 345 - Culture, Mental Health, & Psychiatry

1 course unit

This seminar focuses on mental illness and psychiatry in cross-cultural perspective and will orient students to anthropological perspectives on emotions and emotional support across cultures, meanings of illness and disease, the historical construction of psychiatric knowledge in Western Europe and North America, and the social and cultural context of treatments for mental illness. We will examine ethnographic accounts of psychiatric practice and experiences of mental illness in different cultural settings, including in the United States. In doing so, we critically examine psychiatric disease categories such as schizophrenia, “culture-bound” mental disorders, ADHD, and drug and alcohol addictions.
Prerequisite(s): ATH 112 Cultural Anthropology .