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“There’s No Word for Depression in Zulu”: Inside South Africa’s Mental Health Crisis

Mad in America

R esearch has found South Africa consistently ranks in the bottom three performing countries in terms of global mental health. The 2004 national South Africa Stress and Health study , the first large-scale research project of its kind in the country, found the lifetime prevalence of any DSM mental health diagnosis to be 30.3%.

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The Poetics and Politics of Our Mental Health Metaphors: An Interview with Laurence Kirmayer

Mad in America

His critiques extend to how psychiatric categories reflect colonial histories and obscure social causes , as well as how attempts to localize mental health interventions may still impose Western norms. Most of what we do depends on our more complex mental faculties, and those faculties are, at their core, social.

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Context and Care vs. Isolate and Control: An Interview on the Dilemmas of Global Mental Heath with Arthur Kleinman

Mad in America

As a Professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard University’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine and a Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Kleinman has profoundly influenced how medical professionals understand the interplay between culture, illness, and healing. But do they?