Purpose -This paper seeks to examine the value of teaching about mental illness through the use of literature.Design/methodology/approach -Using the examples of two colleges in eastern USA that focus on educating students for healthcare careers, the paper examines two different course formats for using literature to teach about mental illness: a course that places the topic within the larger context of medicine and literature; and a freestanding madness and literature course.Findings -While professional education tends towards specialization, it can lead to a monocultural vision that limits approaches to patients and problems alike. Courses integrating mental illness and literature were found to be effective means of counteracting this trend.Research limitations/implications -The study is limited to two healthcare-centred colleges in eastern USA.Practical implications -For mental health clinicians and healthcare professionals in general, literature broadens the scope of both perspectives and analytical tools for understanding mental disorders and responses to them.Originality/value -While literature courses often contain such themes as mental illness, courses that truly integrate literature with mental illness meet a growing need for interdisciplinary education as a means of preparing more flexibly thinking healthcare professionals.

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Ethnographic knowledge production exists in implicit tension with the tenets of a critical disciplinary politics normalized in the reflexive critiques of the late 20th century. Anthropologists have responded with numerous theoretical ‘turns,’ which in different ways attempt to reconcile the conflicting imperatives of critical attention to histories of power and inequality, with rich and nuanced accounts of cultural worlds and peoples’ agentive roles in them. This article proposes Situated Comparison as one possible methodological approach to this epistemological dilemma. We propose explicit attention to multiple local understandings of categorical social differentiation, which we compare on a plane of epistemic equality with academic theories of those same boundaries. Examples from two disparate fieldwork contexts—classed ideas of ethical sociality in the rural American South; and guanxi and social intimacy in Shanghai, China—demonstrate the potential of this methodology for reflexive engagement with ideas of personhood and self across lines of difference.

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