About

Arthur Kleinman is a physician and anthropologist born on March 11, 1941. He is the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology, Professor of Medical Anthropology in Global Health and Social Medicine, and Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Kleinman is a leading figure in medical anthropology, cultural psychiatry, global health, social medicine, and medical humanities. A graduate of Stanford University and Stanford Medical School, he holds a master’s degree in social anthropology from Harvard and was trained in psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Since 1978, he has conducted research in China, and from 1969 until 1978, he conducted research in Taiwan. Kleinman has published extensively, including seven single-authored books such as 'Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture,' 'The Illness Narratives,' and 'The Soul of Care,' as well as co-authored and edited volumes on topics like global health, depression, SARS in China, and the anthropology-philosophy relationship. His research interests include global mental health, social suffering, caregiving, social technology for aging, and trust in doctor-patient relationships, with recent projects focusing on eldercare for dementia in Asian settings and social technologies for aging in China. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he previously served as the Victor and William Fung director of Harvard’s Asia Center.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Medicine
• Computer Science
• Engineering
• Management science
• Psychiatry
• Epistemology
• Clinical psychology
• Medical emergency
• Philosophy
• Demography
• Archaeology
• Psychology
• Traditional medicine
• History

Selected publications

• Medicine, psychotherapy, and artificial intelligence

  The Lancet · 2026-05-01

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• William James: physician of the public's soul

  The Lancet · 2024-03-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Global Mental Health: The View from Social Medicine and Medical Anthropology

  Taiwanese Journal of Psychiatry · 2024-07-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Background: This article explores the interplay between social medicine and medical anthropology in shaping global mental health perspectives. Methods: In this review, the author has reviewed pertinent topics about the interplay between social medicine and medical anthropology as reflected in his professional work presented in a 2023 special issue of Daedalus and a special lecture delivered to the Taiwanese Society of Psychiatry in June 2024. Results: How societal factors such as economic disparity, gender norms, ethnic conflicts, and global cultural shifts significantly influence mental health outcomes are highlighted. The discussion extends to the mental health repercussions of COVID-19 pandemic, the implications of aging populations, and the growing prevalence of dementia. In addition, the article critiques current mental health strategies, advocating for a broader approach that integrates social, cultural, and economic interventions. The role of community-based care is emphasized, with a particular focus on the effectiveness of community health workers in delivering mental health services. This piece calls for a reevaluation of psychiatric practices to more comprehensively address the complexities of global mental health, urging a move toward structurally and culturally sensitive care solutions. Conclusion: Psychiatry needs to change and will change, owing to global forces and new research that are creating a different kind of mental health-care system for the future.

  PublisherDOI

• Stigma of Mental Illness, Principles

  Elsevier eBooks · 2024-08-07

  book-chapterSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Somatization:

  2023-04-28

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: How Mental Health Matters

  Daedalus · 2023-01-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract The underpinnings of today's mental health crisis include both social structural inequities and neurobiological vulnerabilities. The COVID-19 pandemic has compounded and escalated a long-standing problem, rendering the mental health crisis and its dangerous consequences visible and exigent. We now possess a clearer and more nuanced understanding of the broken mental health care system and its serious inadequacies, as well as its potential for effective caregiving. The professional forms of knowledge and practice are paralleled by an even more substantial system of care involving families, networks, communities, and, of course, those living with mental health conditions themselves. Even when delivered by community care workers, psychotherapy can be as effective as somatic treatments for some mental health conditions. Harm reduction and other public health approaches offer means of preventing or mitigating the disastrous human toll of the substance use disorder epidemic. Social technology offers new opportunities for enhancing mental health and well-being. With these informal systems alongside standardized health care systems, the future could realize a mental health care system with much greater potential to avert the worst harms and offer effective care to many more.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture

  2023 · 1991 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Traditional medicine
  • Medicine
  • History
  PublisherDOI

• Preface

  Daedalus · 2023-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  I have been a participant in the mental health field for over half a century as a practitioner, researcher, educator, and advocate. When I presented the first World Mental Health Report to the United Nations in 1995, I nonetheless had too little an appreciation for just how huge and severe the mental health crisis would become. Nor did I understand that the stigma regarding common mental health problems would lessen under the pressure of the current mental health crisis, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the escalating drug-use epidemic, such that ordinary public discourse about mental health would become mainstream. The time to engage deeply and actively with mental health has come. I thank the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for giving me the opportunity to organize this issue of Dædalus entirely around the subject of mental health, and the authors themselves for their important contributions.As editor, I have brought a perspective to bear that places the burden of mental suffering in societal context, where history, economic forces, poverty and violence, race, gender, cultural norms, personal agency, and social experience are given prominence. And where tough questions also beg to be asked about the biomedical-research, institutional, and policy orientations and commercial considerations that have come to dominate the field and constrain the responses of clinicians and health agencies.The contributors’ engagement with mental health illustrates the profound suffering and the search for healing and relief confronting so many in our own society and in countries poor and rich across the globe. While this volume has fourteen essays, they are still insufficient to convey the breadth and reach of this vast subject. Collectively they offer timely illustrations of what much of mental health and care is, or should be, about. Yet they are only an introduction to the key issues that matter to ordinary people and professionals. They convey the extraordinary seriousness and scope of the mental health crisis, but they also describe approaches and interventions that have promise in quite different contexts. I trust that the wisdom and experience of the contributors will inspire, inform, and validate the efforts of so many who are working to find ways to relieve mental ill health and suffering in the most diverse of social and economic contexts.We urgently need a political movement for mental health that is grounded in a moral purpose, similar to that for HIV/AIDS in the late 1980s and 1990s that produced such wide-ranging benefits for treatment, policy, research, teaching, and advocacy. In 2016, together with Jim Yong Kim, then president of the World Bank, and Margaret Chan, then head of World Health Organization, I organized a multi-day conference, Out of the Shadows. We hoped the international gathering would be one inflection point for building a global movement. The contributions to this volume of Dædalus are intended to orient and inspire conversations and action toward such a movement at global and local levels. It is my hope that these essays will provide encouragement to those living with mental health conditions and those working in the community and clinic, as well as researchers and teachers of coming generations, who are committed to the relief of mental and social suffering. If stakeholders ranging from major multilateral organizations to local communities can be supported to fight the most devastating of infectious diseases, so too could we see a global force for mental health in prevention, care, and treatment.I wish to thank the contributors, especially Anne Becker and Giuseppe Raviola, as well as Phyllis Bendell, Key Bird, and Peter Walton of the Dædalus staff, and our readers for focusing on what is at stake for mental health and those who care deeply about it.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Physics of Darwinian Evolution

  Annals of Clinical and Medical Case Reports · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper describes the physical (thermodynamic) laws that govern Darwinian Evolution. When one understands how to apply these laws of physics, it becomes clear how clinical, experimental, and empirical examples of Darwinian Evolution behave the way they do. In particular, this paper shows which thermodynamic laws need to be applied to model and describe the evolution of antimicrobial drug resistance and the diversification of cancer cells.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Good Mental Health Care: What It Is, What It Is Not & What It Could Be

  Daedalus · 2023-01-01 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract What makes for good mental health care? What are the barriers to good care and, when they can be overcome, what accounts for successful treatment? What does successful treatment and care, in fact, mean? Can they mean different things to different people? If so, how can we think about them in a practical way that is useful to patients, families, and clinicians? On the one hand, from work infields as various as neuroscience, clinical psychology, and anthropology, we are learning (and rediscovering) more and more about how the human mind works and the many ways that psychological suffering can be preempted and treated. On the other hand, in many ways, the mental health care system is either dysfunctional or working against what we know to be best for psychological and social flourishing-the disappearance, for example, of true “care” from medical and mental health care systems. In this essay, set against the background of diverse perspectives provided by the foregoing essays in this volume, we attempt to frame and address some of these basic questions, giving priority to practical, down-to-earth, lay, and professional considerations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant T32MH018006

  NIH · $3.7M · 2008

Frequent coauthors

• Madelyn S. Gould

  Columbia University

  194 shared

• Jeanne A. Teresi

  Hebrew Home

  112 shared

• Byron J. Good

  Harvard Global Health Institute

  96 shared

• Frank Marrocco

  William Alanson White Institute

  65 shared

• Kenneth S. Kendler

  Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

  53 shared

• João Biehl

  Princeton University

  53 shared

• Renée C. Fox

  50 shared

• Paul U. Unschuld

  50 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Medical Anthropology

  Harvard University

  1972

• M.A., Social Relations

  Harvard University

  1966

• B.A., Anthropology

  University of California, Berkeley

  1963

Awards & honors

• Member of the National Academy of Medicine
• Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences