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Arthur Kleinman is a prominent American psychiatrist and is the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of medical anthropology and cross-cultural psychiatry at Harvard University, USA. He is well known for his work on mental illness in Chinese culture, was the chair of the Harvard Department of Anthropology from 2004–07 and currently serves as Director of the Harvard University Asia Center. Kleinman is married to Joan Kleinman, a sinologist at Harvard.
Since 1968, Kleinman 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. He has written on the intersection of public health and international issues as well as social suffering, on cross-cultural psychiatry, and on the individual experience of pain and disability.
Kleinman has done much to demonstrate that mental distress is much more likely to be expressed as somatized distress than as psychological distress by Chinese or East Asian patients. He has also contributed to anthropological and medical understanding of culture-bound syndromes, particularly in Chinese and East Asian culture.
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