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We adopt a comparative, historical, and cultural approach to mental health, and its accompanying illnesses, remedies, and institutions. Especially important will be the creation of cultural consensus surrounding categories of normal and pathological in mental health, and their subsequent codification in diagnoses, treatments, and institutions. We'll examine psychoanalytic theory, American psychiatry, and debates that call the very premise of disordered health and "madness" into question. We'll also focus on ethnographic accounts of mental illnesses: depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, and the global rise of pharmaceuticals treatments.