Paper short abstract:

Anthropology and psychiatry have a long relationship, and one of the places at which they overlap most significantly is in addressing religious phenomena in relation to mental health. This paper discusses how that relation is carried over into the developing field of global mental health.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropology and psychiatry have a long relationship, and one of the places at which they overlap most significantly is in addressing religious phenomena in relation to mental health. If anthropology leaves behind its concern with religious phenomena in order to participate in facilitate the global delivery of psychiatric services, and psychiatry is taken up with the urgency of its global clinical task to the detriment of its responsibility to understand and interpret mental illness, then the fruits of this relationship will be squandered. The treatment of religion in literature on global mental health can be taken as indicative of how the field treats the larger issue of meaning, and this in turn as indicative of the sensitivity of global mental health to the problems of experience and subjectivity. This paper discusses how the relation between anthropology and psychiatry is being reproduced and whether it is being enhanced by a global cross-cultural perspective in the developing field of global mental health.