There are multiple closely related fields that you could look into, namely social psychiatry, cultural psychiatry, and psychiatric anthropology. American Psychiatric Publishing publishes a
textbook on the topic of clinical aspects of cultural psychiatry, although it hasn't been updated in some time, but it still might be a great place to start to get a broad overview. I did a quick Amazon search and there do seem to be more up-to-date textbooks related to the field, including one from Oxford University Press. Both culture
and psychiatry being such broad themes themselves, these related fields have a lot of breadth as well.
If you wanted to explore its history and get a sense of just how much breadth these fields have, the roots of social psychiatry go back some way: A sociologist named
Durkheim studied suicide rates and connected it to social upheaval. The culturally specific manifestations of illness that are often mentioned in passing in training (e.g., koro, ataque de nervios, piblokto, etc.) are related to controversial
debates on whether the DSM itself contributes to a cultural spread of Western conceptualizations of disease. One of my own ancestors, an anthropologist, tried to understand in the 1950's whether schizophrenia
manifested differently in different cultural groups and he also looked at techniques of dream analysis in the Ute people, discussing their similarities to psychoanalytic techniques, among many other examples. And that's just a spattering of examples of topics within the field. It's really expansive.
One thing that I find interesting is that even my own subspecialty, CL psychiatry, which some think of as a more biological field for the highly medical context in which it is practiced, must have strongly seen itself as more connected to social psychiatry in the past, as in 1968, its journal (formerly called
Psychosomatics and now renamed the
Journal of the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry) had both a social psychiatry
and a sociology/anthropology editor (see screenshot below). This is kind of mind-blowing to me, because it's just hard to see what role dedicated social psychiatry and anthropology editors would even play in
today's conception of CL psychiatry. I guess it's a just a sign of the decline in focus on the last four syllables of the
biopsychosocial in
much of the practice of psychiatry--not to say that there aren't those like yourself, the above poster (Splik), and many others who try to combat this decline by thinking and practicing in a holistic way.
Thanks for tolerating me writing at length about it! I hope myself or the above poster left you some helpful crumbs to follow.
