Byron Joseph Good, PhD, BD

Professor Good has conducted nearly 50 years of research, focused primarily on studies of serious mental illness and community-based care in settings as diverse as rural northern California, psychiatry clinics in the University of California, Davis, neighborhood clinics in Boston, communities in Iranian Azerbaijan, in Yogyakarta in Indonesia, post-conflict and post-tsunami settings in Aceh in Indonesia, and in China (in collaboration with fellows in the Fogarty program). His research has been funded by grants from the US Fulbright program, NIMH, NSF, USAID, the International Organization for Migration, the Harvard Center for Global Health Delivery Dubai, and university funds. Dr. Good has worked intensively in Indonesia since 1996; he is Honorary Visiting Professor at Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta. Dr. Good's research has included intensive ethnographic research of Javanese culture, particularly as related to mental illness, as well as quantitative and ethnographic research on the early phases of psychotic illness, longitudinal course of rapid onset psychosis, and the effectiveness of mental health services.

In 2005, Professor Good became deeply engaged, along with Professor Mary-Jo Good, in mental health work in post-tsunami, post-conflict Aceh. Their work, supported by IOM, documented levels of violence experienced by rural communities at the hands of the Indonesian military during an intense, decades-long military conflict.  This led to a series of intervention projects, undertaken in collaboration with the Provincial and District Health offices and a local university, aimed at providing mental health services to individuals and communities suffering the effects of years of conflict, including torture of community members, as well as studies of the effectiveness of a model mental health outreach program.  This led, in turn, to the development and evaluation of intervention programs aimed at improving care for persons and families living with psychosis in the province of Yogyakarta, as well as to a deep engagement with the experience of being "haunted" -- haunted by the histories of violence in Indonesia, and haunted by individual experiences of trauma -- all in a society routinely haunted by ghosts and spirits. Professor Good is currently writing a collaborative book about living in the wake of violence in Aceh.

Professor Good's theoretical writings began with a deep engagement with cultural phenomenology in studies of professional and popular medical knowledge, of experiences of learning medicine, and epistemological issues raised by such studies. His work has increasingly focused on psychological and psychoanalytic forms of understanding the human subject and modes of subjectivity. This, joined with his work on violence and haunting, have led to an increasing interest in postcolonial subjectivities, in the power of the hidden and unexpressed, and in developing a broader theory of haunting and an anthropological hauntology.

Professor Good has authored and co-edited 13 books and published 141 articles and book chapters. Books include studies of specific psychiatric categories cross-culturally (Culture and Depression [1985], Culture and Panic Disorder [2010], Culture and PTSD  [2016]), studies of subjectivity (Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations [2007], Postcolonial Disorders [2008]), and a 2 volume edited collection on the future of mental health care in Indonesia (in Indonesian, 2019). He is co-editor of a A Reader in Medical Anthropology (2010) and an edited work by anthropologists in conversation with Professor Good's teacher Clifford Geertz (Clifford Geertz by His Colleagues [2005]).