Byron Good
American medical anthropologist
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Through Mental disorder and Biomedicine
Good has contributed primarily to the field of psychological anthropology, and his writings have explored the cultural meaning of mental illnesses, patient narratives of illness, the epistemic perspective of biomedicine and its treatment of non-Western medical knowledge, and the comparative development of mental health systems. He has conducted his research in Iran, Indonesia, and the United States.
Education
Good holds a B.A. degree from Goshen College and a B.D. in Comparative Study of Religions from Harvard Divinity School. In 1977, he received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Chicago with a thesis entitled "The Heart of What's the Matter: The Structure of Medical Discourse in a Provincial Iranian Town."
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Career
In 2013-2015 Good served as President of the Society for Psychological Anthropology. Good delivered the 2010 Marett Memorial Lecture at Oxford University.
Research
Good's recent research and studies the development of mental health services in various cultures, and primarily Indonesia, where he has been conducting research and teaching at the Faculty of Psychology, Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta over the past two decades. He is principal investigator and co-director of the International Pilot Study of the Onset of Schizophrenia, which is a multi-site research project examining the social and cultural aspects of early phases of psychotic illness in various cultural contexts. Good and his wife, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, have also been working with the International Organization for Migration on developing mental health services in Aceh, a region where armed conflict and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami have had long-term psychological effects on survivors.
Good's contributions to anthropological theory concern the concept of subjectivity in contemporary societies — specifically addressing the convergence of political, cultural, and psychological dimensions in subjective experience—and with a special focus on Indonesian cultural, political and historical context. He has specifically investigated the ways in which culture and social processes shape the onset, the experience, and the course of psychotic illness, and the ways in which this relationship is embedded in and shaped by local, historical, and political contexts.