ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the author’s decades of experience as a medical anthropologist and clinical psychologist researching mental illness and its treatment, whilst also personally treating patients in several different societies. It presents case examples primarily from fieldwork and clinical practice in Native North American communities and in Bhutan. The World Health Organization has encouraged the use of traditional medicine and its integration into health systems. Sociocultural constructions of illness relate to local understandings of the person and cosmology, which tend to be embedded in spiritual frameworks. Native North American communities can be considered internal colonies of the United States. They face similar problems to lower and middle income countries, such as health disparities, poverty, war-related historical trauma, environmental risks, racism, healing systems that conflict with scientific biomedicine, and a significant burden of mental illness.
