Product Description

In this book, Leinman proposes an international view of mental illness and mental care. He examines how the prevalence and nature of disorders vary in different cultures, how clinicians make their diagnoses, and how they heal, and the educational and practical implications of a true understanding of the interplay between biology and culture.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #190867 in Books
• Published on: 1991-03-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 237 pages

Customer Reviews

An insight into the cultural context of mental health
This book should be essential reading for psychiatrists, psychotherapists, psychologists and other mental health professionals. It addresses the important issue of working with clients from different cultural backgrounds, which Kleinman states has not been given enough emphasis in clinical training programmes.

The cornerstone of this book is Kleinman's message: "There is a need for culturally sensitive and anthropologically informed psychiatric research, diagnostic assessment and treatment".

Approximately 80% of the world's population resides in the non-Western world and yet Western psychiatry still dominates. Kleinman suggests in this book that Western psychiatry as it stands today is not effective in treating people in the non-Western world suffering from mental health disorders. Instead, he proposes that mental health practitioners become more aware of their different clients' needs according to their cultural background.

Kleinman explores the impact of culture upon the practitioner and patient, addressing important issues such as how mental health problems present themselves and are experienced within different cultures, the meaning of illness according to different cultures, assessment procedures, diagnosis, and treatment paradigms specific to clients within different cultural groups. Kleinman makes good use of the psychological literature written regarding cultural issues and mental health to explore the issues covered in this book.

This book is a fascinating and truly insightful read. Kleinman brings cultural issues to life by citing his own substantial clinical experience of working in Asia and Africa. I would thoroughly recommend this book to mental health practitioners and anyone interested in global mental health, if only to stress Kleinman's important message that you cannot take culture out of mental health.