Culture of Mental Illness and Psychiatric Practice in Africa

This book is recommended reading for any professional who desires to understand the ways in which politics, economics, institutions, and culture converge in the provision of mental health care, especially in low-income contexts.

The Culture of Mental Illness and Psychiatric Practice in Africa . . . addresses a much neglected field of study and does so in a broad and interdisciplinary fashion.

Anthropologists . . . will find The Culture of Mental Illness and Psychiatric Practice in Africa to be a consistent case for the integration of psychological, medical, and sociocultural perspectives. With a topic as vast as African mental health, even a sizable book like this one feels as if it is only scraping the surface of the subject, but it shows the promise of anthropological concepts and ethnological methods in the study and treatment of mental illness, not only in Africa but around the world.

In The Culture of Mental Illness and Psychiatric Practice, [the authors] . . . shed light on mental illness in Africa and the way interventions are handled by psychiatric institutions and experts, including physicians and nurses. . . All the volume's chapters, which study treatments used to deal with common and chronic mental disorders, have been well researched and well written.Fall 2015

A review of the literature on African psychology or psychiatry yields few results in relation to the long history and substantial size of this mighty continent and the richness of its cultures. Thus, the valuable array of contributions to the edited volume, The Culture of Mental Illness and Psychiatric Practice in Africa, cannot be understated.