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Making Things Better - a series of public lectures and seminars brought to you by UCL and The British Museum (sponsored by Novartis and The Wellcome Trust).

Date: Thurs Feb 23

Time: 4.30pm-6.00pm

Venue: Sackler Room, Clore Education Centre, The British Museum, Great Russell St, London


Panel Discussion -Things That Matter

David Parkin, Bruce Kapferer, Sushrut Jadhav. Discussant: Roland Littlewood

 

 

The cultural basis of psychiatric diagnostic categories is an urgent and pressing concern that needs to be addressed by future developments in international mental health.

 

One example is the concept of 'category fallacy', in cultural psychiatry considered pivotal in arguing for a theory and practice predicated on local suffering. This discussion, which takes as a starting point the ethnographic example of semen retention and depression among a White British population, argues that many diagnostic categories in the Indian sub-continent might be empirical artefacts of category errors.

 

Regarding the medical "reality" of an illness: does this presume its occurrence in the absence of social or medical context which might anticipate and shape it? This, at least for psychopathology, is practically impossible. Mental illnesses are shaped by their social context and shared meanings, and cases can be found where aetiology seems most intelligible in terms of cultural or personalistic processes.

 

 

Sushrut Jadhav is founding editor of Anthropology and Medicine journal which circulates across 37 countries. His general academic expertise is in cross-cultural psychiatry and clinical anthropology. He is also an Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist at the Mornington Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit, Camden and Islington Community Health Services NHS Trust. Dr Jadhav also provides special interest sessions to the local Trust on Equal Opportunity policies and the Homeless Outreach Service for mentally ill people.

 

Professor Bruce Kapferer is Professor of Anthropology, University of Bergen, Norway. He specialises in social and political processes among communities in South Asia, Southern Africa, and Australia. Professor Kapferer is also playing a major role in establishing new publication series of an anthropological and cross-disciplinary nature. His major areas of expertise include: traditional healing systems, contemporary transitions in cosmological and ritual processes, peasant and urban political economies, and anthropological theory and ethnographic methods.

 

David Parkin's research has been concentrated in eastern Africa, mainly covering Uganda , Kenya and Tanzania (including the Zanzibar islands) and the Indian Ocean rim. Peoples studied include Nilotic-speaking Luo, Bantu-speaking Giriama and other Mijikenda, and coastal Swahili-speakers whose Bantu language is infused with Arabic, Persian and Gujarati. Early research and publications are on Luo migrations and urban family settlement, Giriama rural entrepreneurship and religion, and, in recent years, on Islam and medicine among Swahili-speakers. Theoretical interests informing teaching and writing include comparative medical, moral and religious systems, cross-cultural epistemologies and semantics, and issues arising from the new materiality.

 

Discussant is Roland Littlewood, Professor of Anthropology and Psychiatry Royal Free and UCL Medical School. Through his research and writings, Professor Littlewood has emerged as one of the leading and most distinguished contributors to the field of cultural psychiatry and medical anthropology. He is the author of the classic and influential Aliens and Alienists, in which he examines the links between racism, psychological ill health and inadequate treatment of ethnic minorities, illustrating how the racist bias that exists in psychiatric theory and diagnosis has resulted in inadequate and poorly-researched treatment of patients from ethnic minorities, and arguing that endemic prejudices should be examined and challenged by professionals engaged in treating and caring for the mentally ill.

 

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