Arthur Kleinman

Arthur Michael Kleinman (born March 11, 1941) is an American psychiatrist, psychiatric anthropologist and a professor of medical anthropology and cross-cultural psychiatry at Harvard University. He is well known for his work on mental illness in Chinese culture. Kleinman has contributed to anthropological and medical understanding of culture-bound syndromes, particularly in Chinese and East Asian culture (such as Koro). He has argued that mental distress is much more likely to be expressed as somatized distress (i.e. as a bodily ailment) than as psychological distress by Chinese or East Asian patients. Since 1968, Kleinman has conducted research in Chinese society, first in Taiwan, and since 1978 in China, on depression, somatization, epilepsy, schizophrenia and suicide, and other forms of violence. He has written on the intersection of public health and international issues as well as social suffering, on cross-cultural psychiatry, and on the individual experience of pain and disability. At Harvard, Kleinman has supervised more than 65 Ph.D. students (including 12 M.D.-Ph.D. students), and worked with more than 200 post-doctoral fellows, and he has taught hundreds of medical students and undergraduate students. He was the chair of the Harvard Department of Anthropology from 2004–07 and currently serves as Director of the Harvard University Asia Center.

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