Understanding Madness (KSK_116)
About Study Course
Objective
To raise awareness of mental health and illness as socio-cultural processes by presenting the diversity of explanations of insanity, mental, emotional and psychosocial disorders found in different societies and historical periods, as well as the multiple forms of communication between sufferers, healers and the surrounding society.
Prerequisites
Prior basic knowledge of social sciences.
Learning outcomes
By analysing a range of anthropological and interdisciplinary studies, students are able to compare the diversity of perceptions and treatment of mental disorders across societies and eras; explain the impact of ethnicity, gender and socio-economic status on the expression and treatment of mental distress; recognise theoretical orientations that view mental disorders as a socio-cultural process.
Students are able to integrate theoretical insights about insanity as a cultural phenomenon with data from medical anthropology, social history and sociology about ideas, attitudes and practices in cases of mental disorders; to explain the perspectives of both professionals and lay people on the causes and consequences of mental suffering in the prism of ethnographic data; explain the cultural-historical and social contexts of treatment and healing practices.
Be able to make reasoned judgements based on ethnographic, biographical, sociological and social historical data about the experience, recognition and treatment of forms of mental distress; interpret media discourses about mental and psychosocial disorders; critically analyse forms of mental health care; characterise psychiatry as a discipline rooted in a particular culture and its values and historically changing.
