Arthur Kleinman


Arthur Michael Kleinman is an American psychiatrist, psychiatric anthropologist and a professor of medical anthropology and cross-cultural psychiatry at Harvard University. He is well known for his work on mental illness in Chinese culture.
Kleinman has contributed to anthropological and medical understanding of culture-bound syndromes, particularly in Chinese and East Asian culture. He has argued that mental distress is much more likely to be expressed as somatized distress than as psychological distress by Chinese or East Asian patients. Since 1968, Kleinman has conducted research in Chinese society, first in Taiwan, and since 1978 in China, on depression, somatization, epilepsy, schizophrenia and suicide, and other forms of violence. He 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.
At Harvard, Kleinman has supervised more than 65 Ph.D. students, and worked with more than 200 post-doctoral fellows, and he has taught hundreds of medical students and undergraduate students. He was the chair of the Harvard Department of Anthropology from 2004–07 and currently serves as Director of the Harvard University Asia Center.

Education

Arthur Kleinman received his A.B. and M.D. from Stanford University and M.A. in Social Anthropology from Harvard. He did an internship in internal medicine at the Yale School of Medicine and his psychiatric residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Career

Kleinman is currently the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology, a position he has held since 2002. From 2004 through 2007, he chaired Harvard's Department of Anthropology, and since 2008 he has headed Harvard's Asia Center as Victor and William Fung Director. For a decade, he chaired the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and from 1993–2000 he was Presley Professor in that department. He is currently professor of medical anthropology in the Harvard Medical School Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, and professor of psychiatry. In 2011, Kleinman was awarded the distinction of being named a Harvard College Professor of and was given the Distinguished Faculty Award.
In 1976, he founded the journal Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, and was its Editor-in-Chief until 1986. The journal was continued by Byron and Mary-Jo Good, and Peter J. Guarnaccia.
He directed the World Mental Health Report, co-chaired the American Psychiatric Association’s Taskforce on Culture and DSM-IV, co-chaired the 2002 Institute of Medicine report on Preventing Suicide, and also co-chaired in 2001 and 2002 both the NIH conference on the Science and Ethics of the Placebo and the NIH conference on Stigma. In September 2003, he gave the Distinguished Lecture sponsored by the Fogarty International Center at NIH on the Global Epidemic of Depression and Suicide. He is a consultant to the WHO where he chaired the technical advisory committee of the Nations for Mental Health Action Program and in December 2002 gave the keynote address to the WHO's first international conference on global mental health research.
In September 2003, he co-directed a conference at Harvard on SARS in China; and in the 2003–2004 academic year he co-directed a Conference at Harvard on AIDS in China. In December 2006, he co-directed an NSF funded international meeting on Asian Flus/Avian Flu and in May 2007 he co-chaired a conference on Values in Global Health. He is a member of the Steering Committee of Harvard's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, is a member of the Advisory Board of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, and is on the Steering Committee of Harvard's newly created China fund. He was also appointed to the Dean's Advisory Council in Social Sciences. A member of the Steering Committee of the Harvard Institute of Global Health, Kleinman is co-chair of its Committee on Mental Health and of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Standing Committee on Global Health.
Kleinman has received more than 50 research grants, and is currently involved in various research projects in China studying depression; stigma; suicide; and the health consequences of rural-urban migration. Throughout his career, he has trained a number of prominent researchers and physicians.

Writing

Kleinman has authored six books and over 350 articles, book chapters, reviews and introductions. Perhaps Kleinman's most influential work is Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture, followed by The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition and Social origins of distress and disease: depression, neurasthenia, and pain in modern China. His most recent book, What Really Matters, addresses existential dangers and uncertainties that make moral experience, religion, and ethics so crucial to individuals and society today. This book has been translated and published in Chinese editions both in Shanghai and Taipei.
Kleinman has co-authored many works with other psychiatrists and researchers in the field of mental health and cross-cultural psychiatry, including Paul Farmer, Veena Das, Margaret Lock, Michael Phillips, Byron Good, Mary Del-Vecchio Good, Tsung-yi Lin, and Leon Eisenberg.
Kleinman is co-editor of 29 volumes, including: Social Suffering; Culture and Depression; SARS in China; Global Pharmaceuticals; Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations; Reimagining Global Health: An Introduction; The Culture of Illness and Psychiatric Practice in Africa; and The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy. He has also co-edited 11 special issues of journals. Kleinman is currently writing a book on caregiving based on his articles in the Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine, the Harvard Magazine, and other venues.

Awards and recognition

Kleinman is a member of the National Academy of Medicine of the National Academies and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has delivered numerous lectures on a variety of topics at universities around the world. He has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is Distinguished Lifetime Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association.
Kleinman has twice given the Distinguished Lecture at NIH, and was a member of its Council of Councils from 2007 to 2011. He was also appointed by the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services of the U.S. Government to the Advisory Council of the Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health. In 2003 Kleinman chaired the Selection Committee for the NIH's new Pioneer Awards.
In 2006, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology, and in 2008 received from the SMA the George Foster Award. In 2004, he was awarded the Doubleday Medal in Medical Humanities by University of Manchester, England. In 2007 he received an award in the medical humanities at Imperial College, London He is a winner of the Wellcome Prize of the Royal Anthropological Institute; a recipient of an honorary Doctorate of Science from York University ; and the 2001 winner of the Franz Boas Award of the American Anthropological Association, its highest award. He was awarded an honorary professorship at Fudan University. Shortly thereafter, he was Cleveringa Professor at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands.

Personal life

Kleinman was born and raised in New York. He was married to the late Joan Kleinman, a sinologist and his research collaborator, for 45 years. They have two children and four grandchildren.

Selected list of published works