Friday Morning Seminar in Culture, Psychiatry and Global Mental Health

The Friday Morning Seminar, as it is widely known, has been meeting every year since 1984, when it was launched as the foundational seminar for both a postdoctoral fellowship program in culture, psychiatry, and mental health as well as the predoctoral program in medical anthropology. Since that time, the seminar has brought together an interdisciplinary group of social scientists and clinicians, including faculty, fellows, students, and visiting scholars from across the University and the teaching hospitals, and universities across greater Boston.

The seminar is currently co-sponsored by the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, as well as private donations.

The seminar features presentations of new research and writing by faculty, fellows, and students, and by invited guests. Its perspective is global and international, with a focus on comparative and cross-cultural studies. Some seminars have led to edited books (recently: Postcolonial Disorders; Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations; and Shattering Culture), and special issues for journals such as Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry: An International Journal of Cross-Cultural Research. Every year, we bring to Harvard the most influential and innovative scholars and practitioners, from the US and elsewhere in the world, in an effort to foster a fruitful intellectual exchange as well as stimulate new paths for research.

During the 2020-2021 academic year, much of the seminar's focus has been dedicated to the various cultural, political and psychological aspects of COVID-19 and the pandemic in the United States and around the world. In addition, the seminar focuses on the politics of global psychiatry and mental health care, with special attention to comparative studies of social inequalities and hierarchies; identity, migration, and diversity; political violence and humanitarian interventions; and current debates concerning the relevance of psychiatric and biomedical knowledge, practice, diagnostic categories, treatment, and health care models, for low resource settings.

The seminar is chaired by Professors Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Byron J. Good, and Michael M.J. Fischer, and the organizing committee consists of Drs. Amy Moran-Thomas, Sadeq Rahimi, Michael Nathan, and Eric Jacobson.

The seminar meets 8–10 times or more per semester from 10:00 to 11:50 a.m. ET.  Due to the current pandemic conditions, the meetings, which have traditionally been held in 1550 William James Hall, are now held via Zoom.

For further information and online access details, please contact Dr. Sadeq Rahimi at Sadeq_Rahimi@hms.harvard.edu.