It might seem odd to be plugging someone else’s podcasts, but I wanted to tell you about a BBC series by a colleague at Edinburgh University called Chris Harding, which I found really fascinating. It comprises five episodes in the History Compass series and has the general title ‘The Borders of Sanity’. Chris is an historian of modern south-east Asia. My podcasts look at the diversity of understandings of mental disorder in one part of the world over half a millennium, which saw massive changes. Chris, on the other hand, explores different approaches by looking at how disparate modern-day societies handle mental conditions. For example, 20 years ago depression was almost unknown in Japan, or not diagnosed and treated. Now known as a ‘cold of the soul’, it has been introduced by psychiatrists, lawyers, and pharmaceutical companies. In Ghana, by contrast, most people seek out spiritual interpretations or traditional methods of healing; there are hardly any formally trained psychiatrists. The last episode, ‘Exploring Culture and Mental Health’, brings the whole thing together, asking if the medicalisation of mental illness obscures the wide variation of lived experiences between countries and cultures.
Chris’s podcasts are available on BBC iPlayer