Cultural Psychiatry and Medical Anthropology PDF Download

Author: Roland Littlewood
Publisher: Burns & Oates
ISBN:
Category : Anthropology
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
Arguing that these disciplines are better learned from original papers than from a textbook, even if such a textbook existed, Littlewood and Dein (anthropology and psychiatry, U. College London) compile 16 papers, some well known and some not, but all they consider either canonical or representative. They have preferred classic ethnographic and readable selections to drier critical synopsis typical of much recent work. They provide commentary on each text with suggestions on later research and further reading, and introduce the whole with a short historical overview. They recommend that readers with no background in anthropology have a short dictionary of the field's terms or a general introduction to hand, and likewise those new to psychiatry, a small medical student's textbook on the field.

Author: Arthur Kleinman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520340841
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
From the Preface, by Arthur Kleinman:Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture presents a theoretical framework for studying the relationship between medicine, psychiatry, and culture. That framework is principally illustrated by materials gathered in field research in Taiwan and, to a lesser extent, from materials gathered in similar research in Boston. The reader will find this book contains a dialectical tension between two reciprocally related orientations: it is both a cross-cultural (largely anthropological) perspective on the essential components of clinical care and a clinical perspective on anthropological studies of medicine and psychiatry. That dialectic is embodied in my own academic training and professional life, so that this book is a personal statement. I am a psychiatrist trained in anthropology. I have worked in library, field, and clinic on problems concerning medicine and psychiatry in Chinese culture. I teach cross-cultural psychiatry and medical anthropology, but I also practice and teach consultation psychiatry and take a clinical approach to my major cross-cultural teaching and research involvements. The theoretical framework elaborated in this book has been applied to all of those areas; in turn, they are used to illustrate the theory. Both the theory and its application embody the same dialectic. The purpose of this book is to advance both poles of that dialectic: to demonstrate the critical role of social science (especially anthropology and cross-cultural studies) in clinical medicine and psychiatry and to encourage study of clinical problems by anthropologists and other investigators involved in cross-cultural research.

Author: Arthur Kleinman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520037069
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
Patients and healers in the context of culture: an exploration of the borderland between anthropology, medicine, and psychiatry describes observations of clinical interviews between various medical practitioners, namely folk healers, temple medicine men, and Chinese style and Western style physicians, and their patients. It stresses the importance of adopting proper cultural perspectives, making one's interpretations within that framework, and relying on direct observation; and urges an integration of social and cultural methods into the routine training of doctors, so as to enable a more humane and appropriate clinical practice. Medical anthropology is rich with anecdote and description focused on one or another aspect of patients or diseases, practitioners or healing, symbolisms or religion. This book takes us beyond such details and provides an integrating theoretical framework, operational models, and a systematic methodology of study that will allow the clinician and investigator to avoid the quagmires of ethnocentricity and reductionist formulation. The material is based on ten years of comparative cross-cultural research of Chinese medical systems at the National Taiwan University, Harvard University, the University of Washington, and the National Institutes of Health.

Author: Michael Winkelman
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470462612
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 812

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Book Description
Culture and Health offers an overview of different areas of culture and health, building on foundations of medical anthropology and health behavior theory. It shows how to address the challenges of cross-cultural medicine through interdisciplinary cultural-ecological models and personal and institutional developmental approaches to cross-cultural adaptation and competency. The book addresses the perspectives of clinically applied anthropology, trans-cultural psychiatry and the medical ecology, critical medical anthropology and symbolic paradigms as frameworks for enhanced comprehension of health and the medical encounter. Includes cultural case studies, applied vignettes, and self-assessments.

Author: Arthur Kleinman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520340922
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 551

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Book Description
Some of the most innovative and provocative work on the emotions and illness is occurring in cross-cultural research on depression. Culture and Depression presents the work of anthropologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists who examine the controversies, agreements, and conceptual and methodological problems that arise in the course of such research. A book of enormous depth and breadth of discussion, Culture and Depression enriches the cross-cultural study of emotions and mental illness and leads it in new directions. It commences with a historical study followed by a series of anthropological accounts that examine the problems that arise when depression is assessed in other cultures. This is a work of impressive scholarship which demonstrates that anthropological approaches to affect and illness raise central questions for psychiatry and psychology, and that cross-cultural studies of depression raise equally provocative questions for anthropology.

Author: A. Tarik Yilmaz
Publisher: Karger Medical and Scientific Publishers
ISBN: 3805570481
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
Cultural psychiatry has been the portal through which advances in the social sciences have found their way into medical practice and health policy. Diverse issues and activities in research and practice of cultural and transcultural psychiatry are collected in this timely volume. The contributions can be summarized in three main topics: interdisciplinary settings for practice and research; migration, trauma and the context of migrant mental health, and cultural lessons for treatment. This book provides essential reading for health professionals and social scientists who would like to understand how culture influences mental health as well as the treatment and prevention of mental illness. It will be of special interest to medical anthropologists concerned with the relationship between culture theory and psychiatry, mental health care providers and policy makers in an international environment.

Author: John Cox
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
ISBN: 1846422647
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
`There are many insights and nuggets of value in this collection. Maurice Lipsedge reminds us how badly psychiatry needs anthropology's insights.This book should contribute to the ongoing dialogue between the two fields.' - The Journal of the Royal Antropological Institute `The editors states in the introduction that they wish to encourage the reader `to meet halfway the other discipline'. This expresses the view which all the contributors clearly feel and which is correct, that psychology and psychiatry and anthropology have much to offer each other and indeed are similar in several respects'. - The International Journal of Social Psychiatry `As an introductory text the book is perhaps too difficult, but for students of medical anthropology and cross-cultural psychiatry it offers a useful up to date assessment of the field.' - The International Journal of Social Psychiatry 'This text brings together some noted clinicians and researchers in psychiatry and mental health. The aim is to explore what we can learn from anthropology to achieve a contextual understanding of mental illness and health in contemporary society. The book contains a wide selection of ideas, and works well to bridge the gap between anthropolgy and psychiatry. This book is definitely not for the novice or anyone new to the field. It is, however, worth reading to explore ways in which mental health practitioners can make the shift from ideologies, theories and practices that are only interested in establishing the presence or absence of pathology or illness, towards theory and practice that take account of the meaning of those experiences for people in their everyday lives. One of the authors sums this up well by suggesting that "anthropologically informed methods of enquiry have potential to help establish clearer links between personal suffering and local politico-economic ideologies".` - Openmind. No110, July/Aug 2001 The relevance of transcultural issues for medical practice, including psychiatry, is becoming more widely recognized and medical anthropology is now a major sub-discipline. Written for those working in the mental health services as well as for anthropologists, Anthropological Approaches to Psychological Medicine brings together psychiatry and anthropology and focuses on the implications of their interaction in theory and clinical practice. The book reaffirms the importance of anthropology for fully understanding psychiatric practice and psychological disorders in both socio-historical and individual contexts. The development and use of diagnostic categories, the nature of expressed emotion within cross-cultural contexts and the religious context of perceptions of pathological behaviour are all refracted through an anthropological perspective. The clinical applications of medical anthropology addressed include, in particular, the establishing of cultural competence and an examination of the new perspectives anthropological study can bring to psychosis and depression. The stigmatization of mental illness is also reviewed from an anthropological perspective. Encouraging practitioners to reflect on the position of medicine in a wider cultural context, this is an exciting and comprehensive text which explores the profound importance of an anthropological interpretation for key issues in psychological medicine.

Author: Brandon A Kohrt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315428032
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
While there is increasing political interest in research and policy-making for global mental health, there remain major gaps in the education of students in health fields for understanding the complexities of diverse mental health conditions. Drawing on the experience of many well-known experts in this area, this book uses engaging narratives to illustrate that mental illnesses are not only problems experienced by individuals but must also be understood and treated at the social and cultural levels. The book -includes discussion of traditional versus biomedical beliefs about mental illness, the role of culture in mental illness, intersections between religion and mental health, intersections of mind and body, and access to health care; -is ideal for courses on global mental health in psychology, public health, and anthropology departments and other health-related programs.

Author: Cecil G. Helman
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1351918826
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 707

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Book Description
This important volume includes key papers which outline the history, concepts, research findings and recent controversies in medical anthropology - the cross-cultural study of health, illness and medical care. Among the topics covered are transcultural psychiatry, food and nutrition, anthropology of the body, alcohol and drug use, traditional healers, childbirth and bereavement and the applications of medical anthropology to international health issues, such as the HIV/AIDS pandemic, malaria prevention and family planning. It is a valuable resource not only for scholars and students of medical anthropology but also for health professionals working in multi-cultural settings, or in international medical aid programmes.

Author: Ronald C. Simons
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400952511
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 509

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Book Description
In the last few years there has been a great revival of interest in culture-bound psychiatric syndromes. A spate of new papers has been published on well known and less familiar syndromes, and there have been a number of attempts to put some order into the field of inquiry. In a review of the literature on culture-bound syndromes up to 1969 Yap made certain suggestions for organizing thinking about them which for the most part have not received general acceptance (see Carr, this volume, p. 199). Through the seventies new descriptive and conceptual work was scarce, but in the last few years books and papers discussing the field were authored or edited by Tseng and McDermott (1981), AI-Issa (1982), Friedman and Faguet (1982) and Murphy (1982). In 1983 Favazza summarized his understanding of the state of current thinking for the fourth edition of the Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, and a symposium on culture-bound syndromes was organized by Kenny for the Eighth International Congress of Anthropology and Ethnology. The strong est impression to emerge from all this recent work is that there is no substantive consensus, and that the very concept, "culture-bound syndrome" could well use some serious reconsideration. As the role of culture-specific beliefs and prac tices in all affliction has come to be increasingly recognized it has become less and less clear what sets the culture-bound syndromes apart.