| Arthur Kleinman is one of the world's leading researchers in cross-cultural psychiatry and global mental health, and a major figure in medical anthropology and social medicine. Kleinman is the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology, and Chair, Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University; from 1991 to 2000 he chaired Harvard Medical School's Department of Social Medicine and from 1993-2002 he held the Maude and Lillian Presley Professorship at Harvard Medical School. Since 1968, Kleinman, who is both a psychiatrist and an anthropologist, has conducted research in Chinese society, first in Taiwan, and since 1978 in China, on depression, somatization, epilepsy, schizophrenia and suicide, and other forms of violence. Kleinman is the author of 6 books, editor or co-editor of 28 volumes and special issues of journals, and is author of more than 200 research and review articles and chapters. His chief publications are Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture; Social Origins of Distress and Disease: Neurasthenia, Depression and Pain in Modern China; The Illness Narratives; Rethinking Psychiatry; Culture and Depression; Social Suffering, and his most recent book, What Really Matters.
Arthur Kleinman is a member of the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Science; and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has delivered the Flory Lecture at the University of Adelaide; the Beattie Smith Lecture at University of Melbourne; the Hume Lecture at Yale; the William James Lecture at Harvard Divinity School; the Woodward Lecture at University of Maryland School of Medicine; the Westermarck Lecture at University of Helsinki, the Tanner Lectures at Stanford University; the Nelson Lecture at University of California, Davis, among many other named lectures. In the last several years he has lectured on moral experience at Williams; Amherst; Emory; Rice; Princeton; University College London; New York Academy of Medicine; and Mount Sinai Hospital (The Richman Family Lecture). He has been a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford).
He directed the World Mental Health Report, co-chaired the American Psychiatric Association's Taskforce on Culture and DSM-IV, co-chaired the 2002 Institute of Medicine report on Preventing Suicide, and also co-chaired in 2001 and 2002 both the NIH conference on the Science and Ethics of the Placebo and the NIH conference on Stigma. In September 2003, he gave the Distinguished Lecture sponsored by the Fogarty International Center at NIH on the Global Epidemic of Depression and Suicide. He is a consultant to the WHO where he chaired the technical advisory committee of the Nations for Mental Health Action Program and in December 2002 gave the keynote address to the WHO’s first international conference on global mental health research. He is a winner of the Wellcome Prize of the Royal Anthropological Institute; a recipient of an honorary Doctorate of Science from York University (Canada); and the 2001 winner of the Franz Boas Award of the American Anthropological Association, its highest award. He has also won the Career Achievement Award of the Society for Medical Anthropology. He is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. His most recent book, What Really Matters, addresses existential dangers and uncertainties that make moral experience, religion, and ethics so crucial to individuals and society today.
In September 2003, he co-directed a conference at Harvard on SARS in China; and in the 2003-2004 academic year he co-directed a Conference at Harvard on AIDS in China. In December 2006, he co-directed an NSF funded international meeting on Asian Flus/Avian Flu and in May 2007 he will co-chair a conference on Values in Global Health. He is a member of the Steering Committee of Harvard’s Asia Center and Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies, is a member of the Advisory Board of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, and is on the Steering Committee of Harvard’s newly created China fund. He was also appointed to the Dean's Advisory Council in Social Sciences. A member of the Steering Committee of the Harvard Institute of Global Health, Kleinman is co-chair of its Committee on Mental Health and of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Standing Committee on Global Health.
In 2006 Arthur Kleinman received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology. In 2004, he was awarded the Doubleday Medal in Medical Humanities by University of Manchester, England. He was also appointed by the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services of the U.S. Government to the Advisory Council of the Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health. In 2003 Kleinman chaired the Selection Committee for the NIH’s new Pioneer Awards.
Arthur Kleinman has supervised 50 Ph.D. students (including 12 M.D.-Ph.D. students), and worked with 200 post-doctoral fellows, and he has taught hundreds of medical students and undergraduate students. Kleinman has received more than 50 research grants, and is currently involved in various research projects in China studying depression; stigma; suicide; and the health consequences of rural-urban migration.
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