Presentation Information
[EL-4]From the Culture of Symptoms to the Universals of Care: Why I Shifted from Cultural Psychiatry to Global Mental Health.
*Arthur Kleinman (Harvard University(United States of America))
At the outset of my research career in the late 1960's and early 1970's, I contributed to Cultural Psychiatry such things as the 'category fallacy', the cross-cultural comparison of depressive experience amongst Chinese and Americans, comparative studies of healing systems, and other related subjects. In 1995 I led the team that published the first World Mental Health Report (Oxford University Press). From that time onward I reoriented my work in Medical Anthropology and Psychiatry away from culturally constructed difference, which I felt had been oversold, and toward universals in the experience of mental illness and particularly in care and caregiving. Much of this story is told in my book The Soul of Care. Looking back, my contribution has been meant to emphasize that universals are as important as cultural differences in health and mental health, and particularly in care and caregiving. This lecture will address why that is the case and why going forward Cultural Psychiatry needs to be rebalanced much as the biological hegemony of clinical psychiatry also requires rebalancing in a cultural direction.