Paper short abstract:

This paper will examine the role that anthropological understandings of human moral experience can play in understanding psychiatric distress.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will examine the role that anthropological understandings of human moral experience can play in understanding psychiatric distress. Moral anthropology has emerged recently as an important locus of debate, theory, and ethnographic research. This field's theoretical and ethnographic understanding of morality as cultural system, expressed in embodied existential experience, has direct and multi-faceted relevance for understanding psychiatric distress. The moral experience dimension of psychiatric distress runs through the illness experience: from its onset, through the ways illness experience transforms the relationship of sufferer and social surround, through the experience of treatment, recovery, cultural stigma and relapse. As part of this analysis, the paper will examine the way local moral worlds collide with the institutional values of globalized psychiatry. The paper will compare case material from the United States and Morocco. The case material demonstrates the use of person-centered ethnography as a specific method of clinical ethnography that can productively explore the dynamic interactions of moral experience and illness experience.