AP/ANTH 3280 6.00 Anthropology and Psychiatry in Global Context
NOT OFFERED DURING 2023-2024 ACADEMIC YEAR
This course is concerned with furthering the dialogue and mutual engagement between Medical Anthropology and Cultural Psychiatry - in the context of localized communities, multicultural societies, and global networks alike. Applying a pluralized concept of psychiatry, the course will investigate prevalent practices in clinical psychiatry alongside other culturally and historically formulated strategies of coming to terms with locally defined states of mental disorder. It will explore a diversity of modes of experiencing, expressing, recognizing, interpreting, and addressing mental distress, providing participants with a solid theoretical and conceptual basis while, at the same time, exploring a large body of specific empirical case studies. In so doing, the course offers well-contextualized insights into a number of current issues including the pharmaceutical commodification of mental health, the medicalization of difference, personhood and notions of a 'normal' human condition, stigma and idioms of distress, migration and trauma, psychiatric epidemiology and global mental health policy, and symbolic forms of healing. Engaging with ongoing controversies and debates, it encourages new and critical views onto the practical realities and structural challenges of mental disorder and suffering in Canada and beyond.