Anthropological contributions to the study of mental health and illness span diverse literatures and track a wide field of intellectual traditions and debates in their approaches to mental disorder, treatment, and recovery. Much as can be said of anthropology as a discipline more generally, the long history of the anthropological study of mental illness in cross-cultural context has been entwined in large-scale historical processes, including colonialism, racism, migration, war, and globalization. This history has also been shaped by the dynamic dialogue between anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, and global public health, and from which a number of subfields and intellectual traditions have emerged, among them ethnopsychiatry, cultural psychiatry, social psychiatry, and, most recently, global mental health. While certain core themes in the anthropological study of mental disorder that extend back to the early days of anthropology persist today, others have newly emerged in response to contemporary conditions. Collectively, these core themes recognize how mental illness experiences are richly variable and cultural in nature, and that psychiatric diagnosis is itself contingent, involving styles of reasoning and ways of knowing that are culturally informed and shaped by institutional landscapes and translational processes. These core themes include questions regarding psychiatric taxonomy and whether the classification of mental health problems is universal or culturally relative; the structural sources of human distress and suffering; treatment systems and interventions, such as the role of institutions and therapies in shaping the social course and experience of mental illness; the phenomenology of living with mental disorder; and the forms of psychiatric knowledge and practice enacted in contexts ranging from addiction treatment clinics to humanitarian settings. Studies span a wide range of engagement, from cultural critique to intervention studies that position anthropologists as collaborators in the development of effective and accessible interventions. Many studies draw on anthropology’s classic traditions of ethnography and long-term fieldwork, while raising questions and propositions for the relevance of anthropological methods and theories in the face of new ontologies of mental disorder, emergent technological frontiers, changing political and economic contexts, and the global aspirations of mental health treatment. In their complexity, mental health and illness speak to fundamental questions concerning the nature of human experience in changing worlds, making the topic deeply relevant for anthropology.
Need for an Integrative Conceptual Framework for Addressing Mental Health Challenges During the COVID-19 Pandemic
