Anthropology 290P - Psychological Anthropology

This course introduces the ever-evolving field of Psychological Anthropology through an exploration of culture and mental health. Are psychiatric disease categories and treatment protocols universally applicable? How can we come to understand the lived experience of mental illness and abnormality? And how can we trace the roots of such experience ? whether through brain circuitry, cultural practices, forms of power, or otherwise? In this course, we will draw on studies in psychological anthropology as well as cultural psychiatry, science studies, and decolonizing methodologies to examine mental health and illness in terms of subjective experience, social processes, and knowledge production. Our goal will be to recognize the centrality of the social world as a force that defines and drives the incidence, occurrence, and course of mental illness, as well as to appreciate the complex relationship between professional and personal accounts of disorder.