Byron Good

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Byron Joseph Good, PhD, (born 14 March 1944) is a world-renowned American scholar, researcher and thinker in the fields of Medical and Psychological Anthropology. He is currently Professor of Medical Anthropology at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he served as the Department Head from 2000 to 2006; and Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology, Harvard University. In recognition of his outstanding contributions in areas of research and theory to the fields of Medical and Psychological Anthropology, Byron Good has been awarded the Society for Psychological Anthropology Lifetime Achievement Award for 2017.

Byron Good is director (together with Professor Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good) of the International Mental Health Training Program at Harvard Medical School, a program funded by the Fogarty International Center. He also co-directed the National Institute of Mental Health Training Program in Culture and Mental Health, at Harvard University, a program geared towards postdoctoral training, through which many generations of psychiatrists and medical anthropologists found the opportunity to be trained in a depth-oriented, culture-conscious and meaning-cantered brand of medical and psychological anthropology which Byron Good and his colleagues have cultivated at Harvard for the past few decades. Together with Arthur Kleinman, Byron Good also initiated and directed the ongoing Friday Morning Seminars in Psychological Anthropology and Cultural Psychiatry, which is considered the longest standing seminar series at Harvard University.

Byron Good has dedicated much of his recent work to research and development of mental health services in various cultures, specifically Indonesia, where he has been conducting research and teaching at the Faculty of Medicine, Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta over the past two decades. Byron Good is principal investigator and co-director of the International Pilot Study of the Onset of Psychosis, which is a multi-site research project examining the social and cultural aspects of early phases of psychotic illness in various countries, including Indonesia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China and the United States. Dr. Good and his wife, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, have also been working with IOM, the International Organization for Migration on developing mental health services in Aceh, a society devastated first by internal turmoil and armed conflict and more recently by tsunami.

Byron Good’s main field of interest in anthropological theory concerns a theory 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 formative relationship is embedded in and shaped by local historical and political realities.

From 1986 to 2004 Byron Good served as editor-in-chief of the international journal Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry.

Byron Good holds a B.A. degree from Goshen College, a B.D. in Comparative Study of Religions from Harvard Divinity School, and the Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Chicago.

Books and Edited Collections

1985 A. Kleinman and Byron Good, editors. Culture and Depression: Studies in the Anthropology and Cross‑Cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder. [Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care Series.] Los Angeles: U. of California Press.
1992 Mary-Jo D. Good, Paul Brodwin, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman, editors. Pain as Human Experience: An Anthropological Perspective. Berkeley: U. of California Press.
1994 Byron J. Good. Medicine, Rationality and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press. (Translated and published in French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese.)
1995 Robert Desjarlais, Leon Eisenberg, Byron J. Good, and Arthur Kleinman. World Mental Health: Problems and Priorities in Low Income Countries. New York: Oxford University Press.
2004 Richard Shweder and Byron Good, eds. Clifford Geertz by his Colleagues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Translated into Indonesian.)
2005 Guido Giarelli, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Byron Good, eds. Clinical Hermeneutics. Bologna, Italy (in Italian only).
2007 Joao Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman, eds. Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations. University of California Press.
2008 Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Sandra Hyde, Sarah Pinto, and Byron Good, eds. Postcolonial Disorders. University of California Press.
2009 Devon Hinton and Byron Good, eds. Culture and Panic Disorder. Stanford University Press.
2010 Byron Good, Michael Fischer, Sarah Willen, Mary-Jo Good. A Reader in Medical Anthropology: Theoretical Trajectories, Emergent Realities. Wiley-Blackwell Publishers.
2015 Devon Hinton and Byron Good, eds. Culture and PTSD. University of Pennsylvania Press.