ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the challenges in identifying, preventing, and treating mental illness across settings varied by culture and by access to health care and other material resources. It addresses three foundational issues at the intersection of anthropology and global mental health. Mental illness cannot be diagnosed with a blood test or chest X-ray. The chapter provides the important information about the history of anthropology and global mental health to orient the reader into the historical debates, intellectual queries, lessons learned, and future of this discipline. It introduces more details on these topical areas and the role of anthropology in them at the beginning of each section to illustrate the ties between the ethnographic accounts and major themes. The chapter also introduces the methods utilized, from ethnography to in-depth one-on-one qualitative interviews to standardized psychiatric assessments of depression and anxiety and even biological markers of stress.
