Do not cite without the authors’ permission 1 Exploring pathways of distress and mental disorders: The case of Quechua-speaking populations in the Peruvian Andes Duncan Pedersen & Hanna Kienzler In this chapter, we aim at building a transdisciplinary framework between medicine, psychiatry and anthropology to investigate how indigenous populations in the Peruvian Andes express their distress and suffering, and assign meaning to their experience. We explore how troubling and traumatic experiences enter inner life processes and are expressed through narratives of distress, pain and suffering, and how these narratives are later appropriated by bio- medical scientists who transform them into scientific categories, such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression, classify them as diseases or disorders, and later deal with them by employing some form of therapy or symptomatic treatment. Our conceptual framework is based on the assumption that the mental (mind) and physical (brain or body) are linked in complex ways largely determined by social structures, modeled by culture and mediated by social position. In attempting this “mysterious jump from mind into body” – as postulated by Felix Deutsch – we stay away from the oversimplified linear causality model of psychosomatic medicine and adopt a more dynamic, transdisciplinary, structural and interpretative conceptual frame. Theories that consider mind and body to be distinct kinds of substances or natures are becoming increasingly obsolete. Instead, they give way to transdisciplinary conceptual frames that emphasize novel ways of perceiving body and mind, acknowledging the subjectivity of the illness experience and expression of distress, and recognizing that symptoms are simultaneously connected to social context, life experience and health and illness outcomes. For instance, it is recognized that neurobiology is based on the unbreakable relationship between a person’s life experience (biography) and the modeling of his/her biological memory, the coding of neural networks along the history of persons, and the bio-psycho-social dynamics of higher consciousness and subjectivity (Dongier, Engels, & Ramsay, 1996). Biology should not any longer be seen as a rigid, monolithic structure but as a dynamic, interpersonal, historical and evolutionary process (Eisenberg, 1995).