Arthur Kleinman

Arthur Kleinman (b. 1941) is a prominent American psychiatrist and professor of medical anthropology and cross-cultural psychiatry at Harvard University, USA. He is well known for his work on mental illness in Chinese culture. Kleinman is married to Joan Kleinman, a sinologist at Harvard.

Kleinman 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.

Kleinman has done much to demonstrate 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. He has also contributed to anthropological and medical understanding of culture-bound syndromes, particularly in Chinese and East Asian culture (such as Koro).

He has co-authored many works with other celebrated psychiatrists and researchers in the field of mental health and cross-cultural psychiatry, including Paul Farmer, Veena Das, Margaret Locke, Michael Phillips, Byron Good, Mary Delvecchio Good, Tsung-yi Lin, and Leon Eisenberg. Perhaps Kleinman's most influential work is Patients and healers in the context of culture (1980), a groundbreaking work of medical anthropology, followed by The Illness Narratives: suffering, healing, and the human condition (1988) and Social origins of distress and disease: depression, neurasthenia, and pain in modern China (1986).

Selected list of published works

 * Medicine in Chinese cultures : comparative studies of health care in Chinese and other societies: papers and discussions from a conference held in Seattle, Washington, U.S.A., February 1974 / edited by Arthur Kleinman ... [et al.]. -- U.S. Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare, Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health, 1975.
 * Culture and healing in Asian societies : anthropological, psychiatric, and public health studies / edited by Arthur Kleinman ... [et al.]. - - G.K. Hall, 1978
 * Normal and abnormal behavior in Chinese culture / edited by Arthur Kle inman and Tsung-yi Lin. -- D. Reidel, 1981. -- (Culture, illness, and healing / editor-in-chief, Arthur Kleinman ; v. 2)
 * Patients and healers in the context of culture : an exploration of the borderland between anthropology, medicine, and psychiatry / Arthur Kleinman. -- University of California Press, 1980.
 * Culture and depression : studies in the anthropology and cross-cultura l psychiatry of affect and disorder / edited by Arthur Kleinman and Byron Good. -- University of California Press, 1985. --
 * Social origins of distress and disease : depression, neurasthenia, and pain in modern China / Kleinman -- Yale Univ ersity Press, 1986
 * The illness narratives: suffering, healing, and the human condition / Kleinman -- Basic Books, 1988
 * Rethinking psychiatry : from cultural category to personal experience / Kleinman ; Free Press, 1991
 * Social suffering / edited by Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock -- University of California Press, 1997 & Oxford University Press, 1997
 * Writing at the margin : discourse between anthropology and medicine / Kleinman. -- University of California Press, 1995