Arthur Kleinman

Who is Arthur Kleinman?

Arthur Michael Kleinman is an American psychiatrist, psychiatric anthropologist and a professor of medical anthropology, cross-cultural psychiatry and global health and social medicine at Harvard University. A prominent figure across multiple disciplines: medical anthropology, cultural psychiatry, global health, social medicine, and medical humanities have been his areas of focus.

Dr. Kleinman is a member of Harvard's Council on Asian Studies, and of its Center for the Study of World Religions, a former Guggenheim Fellow, and Honorary Professor at Fudan University (Shanghai), the Cleveringa Professor at the University of Leiden and Royal Society Visiting Professor at the University of Hong Kong. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as being a distinguished lifetime fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He was also a member of the National Institute of Health's Council of Councils.

Since 1978, he has conducted research in China, and in Taiwan from 1969 until 1978. He has examined how people were changing as China was modernizing and globalizing and also the declining quality of caregiving, both there and around the world.

Kleinman has published seven single authored books (as well as co-authored many works with celebrated psychiatrists and researchers) including Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture; Social Origins of Distress and Disease: Depression, Neurasthenia and Pain in Modern China; Rethinking Psychiatry; The Illness Narratives; Writing at the Margin; and What Really Matters. He has also co-edited books on culture and depression; SARS in China; world mental health; suicide; placebos; AIDS in China; and the relationship of anthropology to philosophy (The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy).

Kleinman is currently writing a book on caregiving based on his articles in the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine and other venues.