About

Byron Good is a Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on medical, psychological, and psychiatric anthropology, with primary studies on serious mental illness in Java and traumatic violence in Aceh, Indonesia. Since 1996, he has conducted research on subjectivity, culture, and mental illness in Indonesia, including studies of psychosis, mental health services development in Yogyakarta, and humanitarian responses to traumatic violence in Aceh. He has led projects examining early experiences of psychosis and comparative studies across Indonesia, China, Hong Kong, and the U.S. Prof. Good has collaborated with the International Organization for Migration on studying violence levels and mental health service development in Aceh, which contributed to USAID-supported programs aimed at improving public mental health care. He is also Co-Director of a Fogarty International Center training program that supports mental health research capacity in China, in collaboration with mental health centers in Shanghai and Beijing. His broader anthropological interests include the theorization of subjectivity in contemporary societies, especially in Indonesia, and how psycho-cultural processes influence the onset, experience, and course of psychiatric disorders such as psychosis and PTSD. His recent work explores the concept of hauntology, focusing on ethnographic studies of haunting in relation to violence and historical memory.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Psychiatry
• Psychology
• Social Science
• Philosophy
• Criminology
• Communication
• Psychoanalysis
• Psychotherapist
• Clinical psychology

Selected publications

• Social Determinants of Maternal Mortality Rate in Indonesia: A Commentary

  2025-03-14

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  CommentarySocial Determinants of Maternal Mortality Rate in Indonesia: A CommentaryAna Mariana1, Muhammad Alamsyah Aziz2, Akhmad Yogi Pramatirta2,Siti Nadya Khairunnisa Alamsyah2, Desy Linasari1, Iis Inayati1, Sylvia Mustikasari1,Achmad Kemal Harzif3,

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ethnography from Medical Elsewheres

  Culture Medicine and Psychiatry · 2025-08-12

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Unlocking the mentally ill in Indonesia: An empirical study of the effectiveness of a “Bebas Pasung” program in Central Java

  PLoS ONE · 2024-10-18 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  BACKGROUND: Locking or confinement of persons with severe mental illness has been common in Indonesia. In 2010, the Ministry of Health declared a policy that persons who were locked (pasung) should be unlocked or freed (bebas) from confinement and provided mental health services. This study is an empirical evaluation of the effectiveness of one Bebas Pasung program in Indonesia at two-year follow-up. METHODS: From medical records in Soerojo Mental Hospital, Magelang, Central Java, 114 persons with severe mental illness who had been unlocked, treated, and returned to the community from four districts served by the hospital were identified. At two-year follow-up, 62 caregivers were able to be contacted and willing to participate in a study. Data were collected from hospital records about condition of the patient at time of "unlocking" and at discharge, and primary caregivers were interviewed about the previous locking and care of the patient since return, as well as experiences of caregiving. RESULTS: We provide descriptive data concerning history of illness, reasons for locking, type of confinement, and care of the individual since return. 58% of those unlocked were men, 80% had diagnoses of schizophrenia, and mean age was 35. At follow-up, 24% of this sample had been re-locked; only 44% took medications regularly, including 33% of those re-locked and 47% of those not relocked. A majority cared for themselves, half were partially or fully productive, and the quality of life of family caregivers improved significantly since their family member was unlocked, treated, and returned home. CONCLUSIONS: This program successfully unlocked, treated, and returned to their homes persons with severe mental illness living in pasung or restraints. Findings suggest such unlocking programs need to be linked more closely to community-based mental health and rehabilitation services, maintain care of the patient, and provide a path toward recovery.

  PublisherDOI

• Advancing suicide prevention through legislative action in Indonesia: The 2024 Presidential Decree on mental health and suicide

  Asian Journal of Psychiatry · 2024-12-26

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Unlocking the mentally ill in Indonesia: An empirical study of the effectiveness of a “Bebas Pasung” program in Central Java

  medRxiv · 2024-04-03 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Background Locking or confinement of persons with severe mental illness has been common in Indonesia. In 2010, the Ministry of Health declared a policy that persons who were locked ( pasung ) should be unlocked or freed ( bebas ) from confinement and provided mental health services. This study is an empirical evaluation of the effectiveness of one Bebas Pasung program in Indonesia at two-year follow-up. Methods From medical records in Soerojo Mental Hospital, Magelang, Central Java, 114 persons with severe mental illness who had been unlocked, treated, and returned to the community from four districts served by the hospital were identified. At two-year follow-up, 62 caregivers were able to be contacted and willing to participate in a study. Data were collected from hospital records about condition of the patient at time of ‘unlocking’ and at discharge, and primary caregivers were interviewed about the previous locking and care of the patient since return, as well as experiences of caregiving. Results We provide descriptive data concerning history of illness, reasons for locking, type of confinement, and care of the individual since return. 58% of those unlocked were men, 80% had diagnoses of schizophrenia, and mean age was 35. At follow-up, 24% of this sample had been re-locked; only 44% took medications regularly, including 33% of those re-locked and 47% of those not relocked. A majority cared for themselves, half were partially or fully productive, and the quality of life of family caregivers improved significantly since their family member was unlocked, treated, and returned home. Conclusions This program successfully unlocked, treated, and returned to their homes persons with severe mental illness living in pasung or restraints. Findings suggest such unlocking programs need to be linked more closely to community-based mental health and rehabilitation services, maintain care of the patient, and provide a path toward recovery.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Epilogue:

  2023-04-28

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Heart of What's the Matter

  2023-01-17 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Our understanding of the psychosocial and cultural dimensions of disease and illness is limited not merely by a lack of empirical knowledge but also by an inadequate medical semantics. The empiricist theories of medical language commonly employed both by comparative ethnosemantic studies and by medical theory are unable to account for the integration of illness and the language of high medical traditions into distinctive social and symbolic contexts. A semantic network analysis conceives the meaning of illness categories to be constituted not primarily as an ostensive relationship between signs and natural disease entities but as a ‘syndrome’ of symbols and experiences which typically ‘run together’ for the members of a society. Such analysis dirests our attention to the patterns of associations which provide meaning to elements of a medical lexicon and to the constitution of that meaning through the use of medical discourse to articulate distinctive configurations of social stress and to negotiate relief for the sufferer. This paper provides a critical discussion of medical semantics and develops a semantic network analysis of ‘heart distress’, a folk illness in Iran.

  PublisherDOI

• The principles of recovery-oriented mental health services: A review of the guidelines from five different countries for developing a protocol to be implemented in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

  PLoS ONE · 2023-03-02 · 25 citations

  reviewOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  BACKGROUND: Recovery-oriented mental health service has become the focus of global change in mental health services. Most of North industrialized countries have adopted and implemented this paradigm in the last two decades. Only recently that some developing countries are trying to follow this step. In Indonesia's case, there has been little attention to developing a recovery orientation by mental health authorities. The aim of this article is to synthesize and analyze the recovery-oriented guidelines from five industrialized countries that we can use as a primary model for developing a protocol to be implemented in community health centre in Kulonprogo District, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. METHOD: We used a narrative literature review by searching for guidelines from many different sources. We found 57 guidelines, but only 13 from five countries met the criteria, including five guidelines from Australia, one from Ireland, three from Canada, two from the UK, and two from the US. To analyze the data, we used an inductive thematic analysis to explore the themes of each principle as described by the guideline. RESULT: The results of the thematic analysis revealed seven recovery principles, including (1) cultivating positive hope, (2) establishing partnerships and collaboration, (3) ensuring organizational commitment and evaluation, (4) recognizing the consumer's rights, (5) focusing on person-centeredness and empowerment, (6) recognizing an individual's uniqueness and social context, and (7) facilitating social support,. These seven principles are not independent, rather they are interrelated and overlap each other. CONCLUSION: The principle of person-centeredness and empowerment is central to the recovery-oriented mental health system, while the principle of hope is also essential to embracing all the other principles. We will adjust and implement the result of the review in our project focusing on developing recovery-oriented mental health service in the community health center in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. We hope that this framework will be adopted by the central government in Indonesia and other developing countries.

  PublisherDOI

• The Interpretation of Iranian Depressive Illness and Dysphoric Affect

  University of California Press eBooks · 2023 · 21 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Psychiatry
  • Philosophy
  PublisherDOI

• Afterword: Haunted histories and the silences of everyday life

  2023-04-05 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant T32MH018006

  NIH · $3.7M · 2008

• NIH Grant D43TW005809

  NIH · $2.3M · 2013

• NIH Grant D43TW009081

  NIH · $1.2M · 2018

Frequent coauthors

• Arthur Kleinman

  96 shared

• Mary‐Jo DelVecchio Good

  Harvard Global Health Institute

  84 shared

• João Biehl

  Princeton University

  53 shared

• Sandra Teresa Hyde

  McGill University

  51 shared

• Sarah Pinto

  51 shared

• David H. Barlow

  49 shared

• Delvecchio Good

  Jewish General Hospital

  49 shared

• Leon Eisenberg

  24 shared