ARTHUR M. KLEINMAN, M.D.

Arthur M. Kleinman, M.D. is the Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Medical Anthropology and Professor of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, where he chaired the Department of Social Medicine from 1991 to 2000. He is also Professor of Social Anthropology at Harvard University. Dr. Kleinman’s research includes: international mental health; cross-cultural studies of depression; the experience of chronic illness; the anthropology of social suffering; and social health policy concerning the overlap of social and health problems including substance abuse, violence and trauma; and ethnicity and health. He has conducted research in Chinese society since 1968. Dr. Kleinman directed the World Mental Health Report and was a member of the Steering Committee of the American Psychiatric Association-National Institute of Mental Health Taskforce on Culture and Psychiatric Diagnosis and Co-Chair of the Committee on Culture, Health and Human Development for the Social Science Research Council. He has authored more than 175 articles and five books, edited or co-edited 17 volumes, and founded the journal Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, which he edited for a decade. Dr. Kleinman has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Since 1978, Dr. Kleinman has co-directed an NIMH-funded Postdoctoral Training Program in Clinically Applied Anthropology. Dr. Kleinman has expertise in international, cross-cultural and anthropological aspects of mental illness.

His honors include: an honorary doctorate from York University in Canada; this year’s Franz Boaz Award from the American Anthropological Association; the Welcome Prize in Medical Anthropology, and membership in the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Physician and Patient.

Dr. Kleinman has practiced as a psychiatrist and is an expert on depression. He has taught several generations of Harvard medical students such subjects as the social roots of disease, the doctor-patient relationship, culture and health care, the moral basis of medical practice, and he co-teaches a new course on medicine and religion.