Mad In America: Science, Psychiatry And Social Justice

Laurence Kirmayer is one of the most influential figures in cultural psychiatry today. A psychiatrist, researcher, and theorist, he serves as James McGill Professor and Director of the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University and Editor-in-Chief of Transcultural Psychiatry. Across decades of work bridging anthropology, psychiatry, and cognitive science, Kirmayer has advanced a complex view of mental health as inseparable from culture, history, language, and political power. His research ranges from Indigenous youth resilience and narrative medicine to the diagnostic metaphors—such as “chemical imbalance” or “trauma”—that reshape identity and possibility. He has helped pioneer integrative approaches that unite phenomenology and neuroscience, including a biopsychosocial model grounded in enactive and embodied cognition, as well as a person-centered, ecosocial framework for understanding suffering beyond reductive biological paradigms. His critiques extend to how psychiatric categorie