Arthur Kleinman > Quotes

“We tend to think of dangers and uncertainties as anomalies in the continuum of life, or irruptions of unpredictable forces into a largely predictable world. I suggest the contrary: that dangers and uncertainties are an inescapable dimension of life. In fact, as we shall come to understand, they make life matter. They define what it means to be human.”
― Arthur Kleinman

“Today, our view of genuine reality is increasingly clouded by professionals whose technical expertise often introduces a superficial and soulless model of the person that denies moral significance. Perhaps the most devastating example for human values is the process of medicalization through which ordinary unhappiness and normal bereavement have been transformed into clinical depression, existential angst turned into anxiety disorders, and the moral consequences of political violence recast as post-traumatic stress disorder. That is, suffering is redefined as mental illness and treated by professional experts, typically with medication. I believe that this diminishes the person,”
― Arthur Kleinman, What Really Matters: Living a Moral Life amidst Uncertainty and Danger

“Yet when the denial becomes so complete that we live under what amounts to a tyranny of not seeing and not speaking the existential truth, it becomes dangerous itself. This is what makes the closest and deepest experiences of catastrophe, loss, and failure so”
― Arthur Kleinman, What Really Matters: Living a Moral Life amidst Uncertainty and Danger

“The most important thing offered by a caregiver is simply their complete presence”
― Arthur Kleinman, The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Doctor

“It may hold coherence in the more affluent West, but it represents the medicalisation of social problems in much of the rest of the world (and perhaps the West as well), where severe economic, political and health constraints create endemic feelings of hopelessness and helplessness, where demoralisation and despair are responses to real conditions of chronic deprivation and persistent loss, where powerlessness is not a cognitive distortion but an accurate mapping of one's place in an oppressive social system, and where moral, religious and political configurations of such problems have coherence for the local population, but psychiatric categories do not.”
― Arthur Kleinman