Best of

Best of Anthropology Blogging 2008
Daniel Lende at Neuroanthropology has done a tremendous job putting together this compendium.

Medicalization, pharmacology and diagnosis

Psychiatrists Revise the Book of Human Troubles
Benedict Carey, New York Times

The Art of Diagnosis
More on the DSM-V from NPR’s On The Media

The Role of Medical Language in Changing Public Perceptions of Illness
Meredith E. Young, Geoffrey R. Norman, Karin R. Humphreys, PLoS One
And an excellent post discussing this paper at Mind Hacks

Diagnosis
Technology, clinical logic and the search for the right diagnosis, from WNYC’s Radiolab

Is There Really an Epidemic of Depression?
At Scientific American’s Mind Matters, Jonah Lehrer interviews Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield about their recent book, The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Illness.

Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption
Marcia Angell, New York Review of Books

An interview with Andrea Tone about her new book: The Age of Anxiety
A History of America’s Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers

Anthropologists reflect on the Mumbai attacks

Jihad, fitna, and Muslims in Mumbai
Veena Das, The Immanent Frame

Is Mumbai’s resilience endlessly renewable?
Arjun Appadurai, The Immanent Frame

In the journals

A special issue of Ethos about empathy, with articles by C. Jason Throop, Kevin Groark, Jean Briggs, Laurence Kirmayer and Douglas Hollan.

Medical Anthropology against War
Marcia Inhorn, Medical Anthropology Quarterly

What Can Critical Medical Anthropology Contribute to Global Health?
A Health Systems Perspective
James Pfeiffer and Mark Nichter, Medical Anthropology Quarterly

Global Health Diplomacy
Vincanne Adams, Thomas Novotny, Hannah Leslie, Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness

When the state and your kidneys fail: Political etiologies in an Egyptian dialysis ward
Sherine F. Hamdy, American Ethnologist

Practices of translation and the making of migrant subjectivities in contemporary Italy
Cristiana Giordano, American Ethnologist

The Prevalence of Mental Disorders among the Homeless in Western Countries: Systematic Review and Meta-Regression Analysis
Seena Fazel, Vivek Khosla, Helen Doll, John Geddes, PLoS Medicine

Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience
Edward Vul, Christine Harris, Piotr Winkielman, & Harold Pashler, Perspectives on Psychological Science.
Discussed at Cognition and Culture, Mind Hacks and The Neurocritic